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Disassembly
Required
Piece by piece,
Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s most famous residents are
being prepared for a new home—a process that’s
taking a team of artists back to the Mesozoic Era by way
of New Jersey.
By Christopher Pratt
It’s a familiar story: after going nowhere for ages,
she’s finally discovered, given a quick makeover and
a catchy name, and thrust in front of the public where she
becomes an instant hit, entertaining big crowds day and night.
Then one day, when she’s maybe a little long in the tooth,
a bit creaky in the joints, the same people who built her up
tear her apart and ship her off to somewhere in New Jersey.
Which, of course, merely sets the stage for her dramatic comeback
on a stage that’s bigger and better than ever. Happy
ending.
That’s sort of what’s playing out these
days at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, where Apatosaurus
louisae and her peers are experiencing the most extreme of makeovers.
Their skeletal bodies are being painstakingly disassembled
and then shipped out—ever so carefully—to be
cleaned and preserved before becoming the main attraction
of Dinosaurs in Their World, the museum’s new dinosaur exhibits
that are scheduled to open by 2008 in a space three times
the size
of the former Dinosaur Hall.
Driven by more than 100 years
of scientific learning, the exhibits will take visitors
on
a chronological journey through distinct periods of the
165 million-year reign of the dinosaur: the Late Triassic,
Late
Jurassic (the exhibit’s highlight, displayed in a new
atrium), and the Early and Late Cretaceous periods. Not
only will visitors see specimens depicted in their specific
time
periods, amid plants and other animals that shared their
ecosystem, but they’ll also see dinosaurs positioned in more dramatic
and scientifically accurate poses.
“
This is one of the largest dinosaur exhibit renovations
ever undertaken,” says Matt Lamanna, the museum’s
new assistant curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and
its chief
dinosaur researcher. “Scientific understanding of
dinosaurs has advanced immeasurably since Diplodocus
carnegii first went
on display in 1907. Dinosaurs in Their World will
reflect that enormous body of research.”
It’s
a once-in-a-century job that requires only the best in
the obscure and hard to
pronounce business of dinosaur “disarticulation.” And
the best is Phil Fraley Productions of Hoboken, New Jersey. “Incredibly
Heavy, Fragile, Weak Objects”
Since March of 2005, in a fascinatingly tedious three-step
process, Phil Fraley and his team have taken apart,
bone by bone, five of the museum’s 15 dinosaur
skeletons for refurbishing and eventual re-mounting
in their new home. The “disarticulation,” or
disassembly, of Diplodocus carnegii (discovered in
1899), Apatosaurus louisae (found in 1909 and named
for Andrew Carnegie's wife), Allosaurus, Protoceratops,
and Tyrannosaurus rex was just completed in August.
Three more specimens—Dryosaurus, Camptosaurus,
and Corythosaurus—could also be freed from their
two-dimensional wall displays for mounting as 3-D,
freestanding skeletons.
Phil Fraley has spent 25 years
learning all about dinosaurs—mostly
how to dismantle, restore, and rebuild their skeletons.
For the past seven months, Fraley and his team of ironworkers,
welders, machinists, and riggers have been carefully,
meticulously freeing the Carnegie dinosaurs from the
iron supports that have held them together and propped
them up for the better part of a century.
All told, Fraley’s
methodical disassembly line has removed more than 1,000
ancient femurs, fibulas,
tibias, ribs, pelvises, and jawbones, and then numbered,
photographed, cataloged, and packed them in foam-padded,
custom-made crates for shipping to Fraley’s
New Jersey studio. Using everything from a huge hydraulic
crane down to precise hand tools, they took apart skeletons
whose pieces weighed as much as a ton. And which, although
they may look pretty solid, are, according to Fraley, “incredibly
heavy, fragile, weak objects. All the glue joints that
were put in to replace missing parts are wearing out
and need to be replaced.”
Truckload by valuable
truckload, all the parts that aren’t
missing have been making the journey to Fraley’s
11,000 square-foot, hangar-like studio a few miles outside
of Manhattan. There, a team of 15 restoration artists
and sculptors has begun the painstaking task
of repairing and restoring the artifacts so they will
last another 100 years.
Over the next two years, they’ll
dig out the epoxies, glues, fillers, patches, and other
gunk applied over
the past century and then repair, rebuild, re-seal, and
re-pack them for shipment back to Pittsburgh. Every step
of the restoration is being documented for the benefit
of the next team of disarticulation specialists, restoration
artists, or whatever they’ll call themselves in
the 22nd century.
The project is a true collaboration
between Fraley’s
crew and the museum’s curators and exhibits staff,
all of whom had a hand in choosing the dinosaurs’ new
poses. “Phil is a great guy,” says Lamanna,
who admits to having been a bit intimidated upon first
meeting him. “We see him as a colleague and a friend.
He really knows his stuff, and he’s added value
from the beginning. He’s so good at what he does,
it leaves me free to concentrate on what I do.”
Phil Fraley and his crew have
dismantled, bone-by-bone, five of the museum’s 15 dinosaur skeletons; carefully
packed each bone; then shipped the precious cargo to Fraley’s
studios in Hoboken, New Jersey, for refurbishing and eventual
re-mounting.
Handling With Care
Fraley looks more like the pro football player he once
aspired to be than the quasi-scientist he’s become.
And he’s apt to use the language of carpentry,
a skill he learned from his father, when expressing
the importance of his work. “
Similar to how an old house settles on its foundation,
to all eyes a specimen looks sturdy and strong,” he
explains. “But then you start digging around and
you begin to see that as the specimen has settled, the
vertical supports have twisted, literally two inches
off center in opposite directions.”
While disarticulating
a shoulder blade, for instance, Fraley’s team found
it was held together by just two threads, literally. “A
good jolt by some guy in there with a waxing machine,
who inadvertently bumps
the base, and….” Fraley knows he doesn’t
have to complete the sentence to make his point.
The same
care will have to be taken during the rebuilding phase
when, Fraley assures, the team will be very aware
that they’re “working with specimens that
are 160 million years of age. They’re big, they’re
heavy, they’re fragile, and even if they’re
handled correctly, they can break. And then you have
to stop everything and put it all back together again.”
 Fraley
and his crew did stop everything when they stumbled upon
a message from the past. While dismantling the Apatosaurus skeleton,
they found a wood plank with the names and ages of the
two men who erected it in 1915: L. S. Coggeshall,
the 38-year-old brother of Arthur Coggeshall, the museum’s
famous then-fossil preparator; and 26-year-old Al Moorhouse.
Months earlier, the museum’s preparation staff
came upon another message from the past inside the wall-mounted Camptosaurus (still
in its stone matrix). The note, rolled up inside a small
jar, gave some vital specs: the year
of discovery, 1928; the names of the men who prepared
and mounted it, which again included L. S. Coggeshall;
and the year it had been taken down and lighted, 1934.
Matt Lamanna finds these discoveries to be a “cool
connection between the past and present.”
Phil Fraley
regularly makes his own connections with the past. “I
think the animal, in a lot of ways, guides us,” he
says. “Someone asked a sculptor
once, ‘How do you know what you’re going
to carve?’ And he answered, ‘Because it’s
already inside. I’m just the instrument that allows
it to come out.’”
He may make his living
restoring the past, but Phil Fraley isn’t inclined
to look even as far back as his last project. “The
satisfaction that I derive from doing this is the process.
It’s the getting there.
And when you finally get there, there’s no point
in standing around looking at what you did.”
Fraley
does allow himself to reflect on those he’s
met along the way. People like Carnegie Museum of Natural
History’s Mary Dawson, curator emeritus, who remains
an important fixture in the museum and the world scientific
community after retiring from her three decades on the
museum’s staff: “She’s a tremendous
person, a great scientist…I respect her so much
for all she’s been able to do and the obstacles
she’s overcome so early on as a woman in this field…” Fraley
says, adding, “the entire Vertebrate Paleontology
staff here really and truly is exceptional.
“
What continues to make my work exciting to me,” he
says, “are the people. The artists, the curators,
the scientists, the museum administrators, the architects,
all these people with all these wonderful ideas and sense
of purpose…moving forward and creating something
greater than all of them as individuals, that collectively
is worth something.
“
It’s not just for us, it’s for people who
come after us,” he says of their handiwork. “For
the next hundred years, every school kid that lives in
Pittsburgh will be coming here and looking at this, and
maybe it’ll inspire one of them, maybe it’ll
say ‘look, anything is possible.’ To me,
that’s what it’s all about.”
Well-articulated.
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Copyright (c)
2005 CARNEGIE Magazine. All rights reserved.