The Cincinnati Museum Center has a one-of-a-kind dinosaur fossil on display, and it will get some special attention next week. The Torvosaurus will be disassembled and scanned.
Paleontologist Brenda Hunda says the 3D scans will be very detailed, and the results can be shared with other researchers.
“The first thing we can expect to know is just about the basic anatomy and how these animals — in particular, this individual — may have moved. It's body posture, all those kinds of clues are hidden in the bones by the way the bones go together and by the scars they have on the bones related to how they might have had muscle attachments associated with it,” she says. “So, just the basic biomechanics of the animal itself, which has never been studied before, is really fascinating.”
The Jurassic-era carnivore will not be taken off display. Hunda says the bones will be removed one or two at a time and scanned, and the public can watch the process.
Hunda says the fossil was set up so it could be easily taken apart.
“I want to think of this as kind of a conveyor belt process where we’re going to be taking bones off, scanning, replacing those bones, taking other bones off,” she says. “We’ll be doing that for about four days.”
Hunda says museum visitors will be able to watch the process.
“That’s because we want the public to see that our dinosaur specimen as well as others at the Museum Center are scientifically researched, valuable specimens,” she says. “They’re not just a pretty face. They actually have a lot of inherent science value and can teach us paleontologists a lot about these animals.”
This specimen was discovered in Colorado in 2013, by a Cincinnati native.
The 30-foot long Jurassic Period apex predator is the most complete specimen uncovered so far.
“It’s the type of dinosaur that exists at the base of what we know about more therapod dinosaurs in terms of their evolutionary history,” Hunda says. “So it’s a pretty early evolutionary version of what we think of when we think of T.rex and other dinosaurs in that therapod line. It’s never been described to science in its entirety.”
The scans start Monday.
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