Dude, Where’s My Sauropod?

Sometimes I forget things - little things, like where I put my keys and stuff like that. I always feel like an idiot when I do this, but I guess I shouldn’t feel so bad, considering it was recently discovered that Toronto’s own Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) had misplaced the skeletal remains of a Barosaurus, an 85 foot long, 150 million year old long-necked herbivore from the Jurassic Period.

Apparently the dino was acquired by the ROM about 45 years ago but was never fully assembled, and somewhere along the line it was simply forgotten about. Fortunately, the Associate Curator of Vertebrate Palaeontology in the ROM’s Department of Natural History (say that five times fast), Dr. David Evans, recently read some literature referring to the museum’s acquisition and decided to do a little detective work to figure out where it had gotten to.

Well, the bones were rediscovered and put back together as a nearly complete set, and it’s going to be unveiled to the public when the ROM opens its new Temerty Dinosaur Galleries on Saturday (December 15th). This is going to be the only “real fossil” Barosaurus on display anywhere in the world. New York’s Museum of Natural History has a Barosaurus on display, but it’s only a casting of fossilized bones. Toronto’s Barosaurus is the real deal.

Watch out for the velociraptor, honey!

It’s been a few years since the ROM has had a dino display open to the public. The gallery many of us know and love from days of yore had to be closed to make room for the mammoth undertaking that was the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal redesign. I found this out the hard way two years ago when I took my daughter, recently hooked on Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park trilogy (soon to add a fourth installment, apparently), to the museum with the promise of seeing real dinosaur bones. Well, fortunately she still digs dinos (as evidenced by her reaction to this summer’s collection of animatronics at the Toronto Zoo), so hopefully when I manage to get the family down to the ROM to check out the new display she’ll agree it’s been well worth the wait.