Glue on, glue off - putting a dinosaur back together again

Leonardo the mummified dinosaur makes his debut at the Houston Museum of Natural Science on Sept. 19 - and we are incredibly excited to see how people react to seeing him. This fossil is so well preserved that you can literally see what Leonardo looked like alive - right down to the texture of his skin. As written in the June 2005 Newsweek article that reported the find, "it evokes, far better than any mounted skeleton, a real animal that lived and died."

Not only can you see what he looked like - you'll also see inside. Leonardo has preserved, internal organs and the exhibit presents the results of high tech scanning of the fossil.

Our paleontology team is also working on the fossilized remains of another hadrosaur, named Peanut, that was found on the same ranch as Leonardo. (You may recognize him from our earlier video, Mapping A Dinosaur with Dr. Bob Bakker.) As you might expect from a fossil specimen that has been subjected to massive geologic forces over millions of years, there is some repair work to be done before it can be displayed. In this video below, associate curator of paleontology, David Temple, discusses one of a paleontologists most frequently-used tools: glue.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• dinosaur
• leonardo
• paleontology
• exhibit
• hmns
• sciencemuseum
• robertbakker