When it’s fully assembled this summer, the alamosaurus in the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science will be among the largest dinosaur skeletons on display in the world.
Even museum officials were surprised at how large.
The earliest discovered specimens of the alamosaurus were about 50 feet long. The museum’s specimen, uncovered a little over a decade ago in Big Bend National Park, was believed to be an unusually big example.
“But when they told me it was going to be 85 feet long, that was longer than we had planned on,” said Anthony Fiorillo, the museum’s curator and research director. “That’s OK. This is Texas, after all. We’re used to dealing with big.”
On Thursday, Fiorillo offered a peek at the T. Boone Pickens Life Then and Now Hall, a 14,000-square-foot dinosaur exhibit space under construction at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.
While the museum along Woodall Rodgers Freeway in Victory Park won’t be open to the public until next year, workers have been assembling the dinosaur skeletons for several months.
The official inventory lists 144 exhibits in the new dinosaur hall, which range from a skeleton of a quetzacoatlus, a flying dinosaur suspended from the hall’s ceiling, to a polished fossil coprolite (matter-of-factly described in the list as “paleo poop”).
But alamosaurus will be the star, rivaled only by pachyrhinosaurus perotorum, a few yards away. The latter was a rare artic dinosaur about the size of a rhinoceros, but weirder looking.
Pachyrhinosaurus — which, to save time, the staff calls the “Perot dinosaur” — was discovered by Fiorillo on Alaska’s North Slope in 2006. It was not until five years later, when staff member Ronald Tykoski was cleaning and fitting the bones together, that museum researchers realized they had discovered a new species of horned dinosaur.
The dinosaur, which was named in honor of the Perot family, has a face like something out of a fantasy video game — with two curved horns on top of its head and a dome over its nose.
The alamosaurus, on the other hand, is a sauropod, a species familiar to anyone who has ever watched The Flintstones.
Longer than the average 18-wheeler, the alamosaurus had a head only slightly larger than a horse, Fiorillo said. “That small of a head on that big a body, you are talking one weird animal,” he said.
As with many museum displays, the alamosaurus exhibit is constructed of polystyrene replicas of the actual bones. A 23-foot stretch of the original fossilized backbone will be displayed nearby.
The towering alamosaurus exhibit consists of 300 bone replicas supported by a metal framework. The bones were reproduced by a company in Ontario, Canada, then assembled in segments and shipped to Dallas.
Not every specimen in the dinosaur hall lived as far away as the Arctic Circle, or even the Rio Grande Valley. The mosasaur skeleton was discovered at Lake Ray Hubbard.
The mosasaurs were not dinosaurs, but ancient marine reptiles believed to be distantly related to the Komodo dragon. They dominated oceans at about the same time alamosaurus walked the earth.
Over millions of years, various species of mosasaurs came and went. As it happens, the stretch of prairie east and south of Dallas has produced one of the most complete mosasaur fossil records in the world, Fiorillo said.
“There’s only one other place that has such a wide range that you find in the Dallas area,” he said. “And that’s the Middle East.”