[ad_1]
The Melbourne Museum will become the permanent home of the most complete triceratops skeleton in the world, with the “immense and unprecedented” $ 3 million acquisition of a 67 million year old dinosaur fossil.
After two years of negotiations and due diligence, the Victorian government and Museums Victoria have negotiated an agreement to bring the triceratops horridus – discovered on private land in the US in 2014 – in Melbourne next year where it will be exhibited for the first time.
“It is immense and, frankly, unprecedented in terms of this type of object of global iconic stature and quality to be in an Australian museum. There is really no precedent, ”Dr Erich Fitzgerald, senior curator of paleontology at the Melbourne Museum, told The Guardian Australia on Wednesday.
The skeleton is at least 87% complete, measures up to seven meters in length from tip to tail, stands more than 2 meters tall and literally weighs a ton. His 261 kg skull is also 99% intact. It is so finely preserved that even impressions and skin tendons are visible.
“Triceratops skeletons that are almost completely intact are rarely found – in fact, they are extremely rare for the triceratops, despite its popularity and iconic status,” Fitzgerald said. “The T-rex is now almost a dime a dozen – a garden dinosaur. It’s simple, a vanilla dinosaur … But there are actually only a handful, maybe four or five essentially complete triceratops skeletons on the entire planet. “
The fossil was discovered on private property in eastern Montana by independent commercial fossil hunter Craig Pfister. Victoria Museums learned of the fossil in 2018 and began investigating its provenance and authenticity. A spokesperson for the organization said it could not share details about the landowner in order to preserve the integrity of the excavation site.
Fossil ownership and trade laws are complicated and vary from country to country, but in the United States the fossils found on private property belong to the landowner and can be sold commercially. Independent prospectors need landowners’ permission to excavate private land, but will often negotiate arrangements with landowners that allow them to share the profits from the sale for any significant discovery.
The fossil trade can also be extremely lucrative: a near-complete Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton sold for $ 31.8 million in October.
Museums Victoria is a member of the International Council of Museums which requires the organization to adhere to a code of ethics on purchasing fossils.
“Museums Victoria’s acquisitions must go through an extremely rigorous due diligence process, provenance due diligence, and that includes a fully detailed investigation of the origins of any item under consideration,” Fitzgerald said. “This was a pretty complicated process, which is why it actually took some time just to get to this point of announcing that we have acquired this fossil.”
This particular fossil was discovered in an area known as Hell Creek, a place that Fitzgerald said “has long been known as one of the richest sources in the world of dinosaur fossils, and indeed, plant fossils and others. animals that lived in the environment. with dinosaurs “.
Hell Creek was also where the famous “Dueling Dinosaurs” – a tyrannosaurus rex and a triceratops stuck in permanent battle – were discovered in 2006.
The triceratops of the Victoria museums dates back to the end of the Cretaceous period, “almost a blink of an eye before the catastrophic events of 66 million years ago that followed the asteroid that struck the Earth and led to a global mass extinction”, Fitzgerald said. “The last moments before the transition into the era of life we live in, the Cenozoic era.”
Fitzgerald, whose paleontological research focuses on fossils of ancient marine animals, said the fascination with dinosaurs is universal in his field. “Anyone lucky enough to become a paleontologist is amazed and in awe of the dinosaurs,” he said.
The triceratops is in the final stage of preparation – the process of cleaning the bones from the rock in a laboratory in Canada – before its move to Australia. Fitzgerald said he hoped it would bring visitors to the museum for “the thrill and wonder of seeing something like this for the first time.”
“It’s the right fossil for a public museum that has a paleontology program to acquire,” he said. “It’s great for public display as an attraction, great for public education, and a scientifically priceless fossil that will inspire and be used in research for generations.”
The museum expects that the skeleton will allow the scientific community to correctly map, for the first time, the entire “anatomy atlas of the triceratops” and allow them to definitively answer basic “vital statistics” about the dinosaur, for example. how big and heavy they really are.
“The triceratops is almost like the last of the great guns – the really big name, the familiar-named dinosaurs – for which we don’t have the answers to those questions yet,” Fitzgerald said.
Despite being in the process of welcoming such a scientifically significant specimen to his hometown, Fitzgerald said the triceratops was not his favorite dinosaur.
“The dinosaurs are still alive. Dinosaurs are all around us. We call them birds, “he said.” My favorite dinosaurs are penguins, because they are the best examples of dinosaurs that went out to sea … Penguins evolved, let’s think from a flying ancestor. And that flying ancestor was a bird “.
Source link
