Continuing this week at EYE WEEKLY's Toronto Notes, our new interview column Areas of My Expertise. We'll be speaking to Torontonians about their special obsessions, habits and collections. This week, we spoke to David Evans, the Associate Curator in Vertebrate Paleontology at the Royal Ontario Museum, about bone collecting, the ROM's new dinosaur gallery and radioactive fossils. Evans, 27, is the youngest curator the ROM has ever hired. He was also instrumental in finding the museum's centerpiece dinosaur "Gordo" — a 90-foot long barosaurus that had been forgotten about and left in the ROM's basement for over forty years. He gave us a tour of the new gallery and the museum's basement archives.

What's the most common misconception about palaeontologists?
That we uncover the fossils in the ground. People think palaeontologists walk out onto the prairie or the badlands or wherever with a shovel and start digging a hole until we find something. But that's like playing darts in a closet with the doors shut and the lights turned off. Most of the time, we hedge our bets, looking for fragments of bone that are already on the surface, that have already weathered out of the rock. If we see one bone poking out, chances are there'll be more where that came from.

How are fossils brought back to the museum?
Although they're basically made of stone, dinosaur bones are very brittle, so if you pick one of them up in the field, it will shatter into a million pieces. At the site, we make casts around the fossil out of plaster of Paris, which are then wrapped with a burlap jacket. It's just like the technique hospitals used to use to make casts for human bones.

Above: Dinosaur bone jackets in the storeroom at the ROM

How long does it take to remove the bones from the jackets?
That's the hard part. The process of collecting a dinosaur actually takes the least amount of time. If you've located a good skeleton, it takes about four to six weeks to bring it back to the lab. But the real time is in preparation, freeing the fossil from the rock back at the lab, and stabilising the specimen. At the moment, one of students, Alan, is working on the ribs of a stegosaurus from the Jurassic era with a dental pick. It's a very slow process. A typical dinosaur skeleton might take two people about two or three years to free from the rock and get ready for display. We have to remove the rock and sandstone from the bone one grain at a time, and it can be very tedious and time-consuming. To chip all the rock away, grain by grain, takes a lot of patience — and a delicate touch.

How many of these do you have left unwrapped?
We have maybe a hundred plaster jackets full of dinosaur bones that haven't even seen the light of day yet, because it takes so long to prepare them. Just in my field of view in the room we're in right now, there's probably five years of work just getting the bones out of the jackets. And we're always collecting more material. At the moment, we're working on releasing the skull of a teenage duck-billed dinosaur that was found in the 1930s, near Drumheller in Alberta. It's probably a new species.

Duck-billed dinosaurs are a specialty of the ROM, right?
Yeah. They're these large, four-footed plant-eating dinosaurs that lived about 85 million to 65 million years ago. They were extremely common. People have referred to them as the "cows of the Cretaceous." They're what the T-Rexes and the carnivores fed on — like the fast food of the dinosaur era. One of the duck-billed dinosaur fossils we have in the gallery [pictured below] is probably our most famous guy — you can find copies of this fossil in cereal boxes, and in every toy dinosaur set ever made. Casts of that skull are in every major dinosaur museum in the world.

Has anyone ever found a dinosaur in Ontario?
No. Ontario is bad news for fossils. We have lots of trilobites and brachiopods — all the Palaeozoic invertebrates from the ancient sea floor — those are pretty common here. But we have very little rock from the age of dinosaurs. Glaciation had a major impact on the topography of Ontario, and glacial activity basically scraped all the younger rocks off. There is an outcrop of rock from the Cretaceous Age near James Bay. We found fossil plants in it. And there's an indication we could find dinosaurs in it. But nothing so far.

The renovated dinosaur gallery at the ROM looks great, but do you find people ever miss the kitschiness of the old display?
Yeah, but I think the new gallery a major step up: it's brighter, and we no longer have those horrendous old dinosaur dioramas — they were like burlap dipped in green paint and thrown at the wall. We have a new ecosystem approach, highlighting the fact that it wasn't only dinosaurs that existed back then — there were lots of mammals living alongside dinosaurs, for 100 million years. People do miss the kitschiness, though. And I miss it in a way, because this was the first place I saw dinosaurs when I was a kid. But for museums to keep people interested you have to shake things up it every decade or so, and update the science. Science progresses a lot faster than you can make exhibits.

Above: Gordo the barosaurus

We have to ask, again, but how do you lose an entire dinosaur? I mean, really.
Our fossil and bone collection is so old and so big, these things tend to happen all the time. The collection has moved so many times in the history of the museum, stuff just gets separated and lost. Our permanent research collection for fossil vertebrates has over 100,000 fossils and catalogued specimens — but there's actually a lot more fossils than that. A complete dinosaur specimen only has one specimen number, but it has 300 bones. So there's lot of fossils.

But it does seem odd to lose an entire 90-foot-long dinosaur.
Well, our old curator wasn't that obsessive about keeping notes. I mean, back in the 1960s there was no computer database — all the information was written on recipe cards, or just kept in people's minds. When we first received the skeleton, it turned out there wasn't enough room in the gallery renovation of the 1970s to display it, and then the curator retired and died and never passed on the story of what the bones meant. And then as time went on, people just assumed they were random sauropod bones, rather than ones that belonged to a larger skeleton. It's not that we didn't realise we had a barosaurus, we just didn't realise how complete it was. The pieces were scattered all over the place. There'd be one half of a leg bone in a drawer, and the other half on the shelf in a completely different one.

How much of the dinosaur on display is actually bone, as opposed to cast?
It's about 45 per cent real bone, and for an animal this size — it would have fifteen tons at least — that's a pretty good amount. When sauropods die, they have to be buried quickly for them to become a complete fossil, and something this big doesn't get buried straight away — instead they become like an all-you-can-eat buffet for carnivorous dinosaurs. Their carcasses get pulled apart. So 45 per cent of one animal like this is a really good chunk.

And finally, why are these cupboards radioactive?
Fossils from the Morrison Formation — that's a late Jurassic series of rocks that produced dinosaurs like the stegosaurus and brontosaurus — are very mildly radioactive. You can actually hunt for them with using a Geiger counter. The fossilisation and geological process infuses the fossils with uranium in trace amounts, so when they get to the ROM, they have to be kept in special lead-lined cabinets. The radiation is mostly harmless, but we have to lock them up, for safety's sake.

 

If you'd like to talk to EYE WEEKLY about your collections or obsessions, email us with the header "An Area of My Expertise."

Email us at: LETTERS@EYEWEEKLY.COM or send your questions to EYEWEEKLY.COM
625 Church St, 6th Floor, Toronto M4Y 2G1