Reconstruction -Breathing life into the fossils-

Reconstruction

-Breathing life into fossils-

It is not easy to imagine the creature as it looked in its lifetime over the fossils just being put on a table, even if they are arranged in correct positons. One would be able to have images of active dinosaurs more easily when these fossils were reconstructed and displayed in a lifelike posture.
In our special exhibition of Mongolian dinosaurs, all the dinos displayed were reconstructed under the supervision of Rinchen Barsbold, the director of Geological Institute, Mongolian Academy of Science. As skeletons seldom survive intact, museum staffs often make replicas (casts) of the missing bones to make up for the completeness of their displays. However, thanks to the completeness of Mongolian fossils, we reconstructed these dinosaurs without using casts,only with original fossils.
The following will be all about the process of breathing life into these fossils done in Nakasato.

Preservation conditions of dinosaur bones

[Photo:Iganodon]

exposiong Iguanodon

Dinosaur fossils are preserved in Mesozoic deposits. When such stratum are scooped out by geological activities and/or erosion, then we can work on those places to find and collect dinosaur bones.
However, it is seldom found with every bones articulated as they had been in life, since the bones were usually disarticulated and jumbled by being swept away by river flow, or by animal scavengers, bacteria, and weathering. As a consequence, it is very unlikely to find a complete skeleton at a single site.

To reconstruct a complete dinosaur skeleton, it is generally required to gather some missing bones from other dinosaurs of same species. When you have lost some pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, you can complete it just by buying another set, but you cannot always obtain a complete set of bones even if multiple bodies of same species have been unearthed by that time. There is a preservation bias of fossils, that is, small, hollow, soft bones (i.e. cartilages) are more difficult to be preserved than big, dense, hard bones.
In such case, museum staff make models of missing bones. In many museums or exhibitions, displays of dinosaur skeletons are usually the chimeras of real fossilized bones and man-made casts. And it is seldom indicated which is real and which is not.

As Mongolian dinosaur fossils are usually found with relatively high completeness, sometimes it is possible to reconstruct a nearly complete skeleton with a single finding. The explanation for this abundance of well-preserved fossils is that bones were buried by wind-carried fine sand more quickly than being carried by a river to be deposited under silt.

For this reason, we could reconstruct Nakasato dinosaur skeletons only with real fossilized bones. Of course, there are still many missing bones, but it is pretty easy to imagine the entire skeletons of those dinosaurs.

Assembling and mounting dinosaur bones

[photo: reconstraction of Saichania]

Reconstructing Saichania