Cabinet of Curiosities - Day 9

Today's item is Bone 37.

It doesn't look terribly impressive does it? But this 'bone' has quite a tale to tell. 

For many years, whenever you visited London's famous Natural History Museum, almost the first person or thing you'd come face to face with was Dippy the Diplodocus.

'Dippy', I should explain, is the nickname of one the museum's oldest and most impressive residents. It's the massive black skeleton of a female Diplodocus that used to dominate the main hall. 

Dippy isn't actually a true fossil; she's a casting made from plaster, charcoal dust and paint and she's been on display at the NHM since May 12th 1905. She's also a bit of a jigsaw having been made from parts of five unrelated Diplodocus skeletons. The original is in the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Other copies are displayed all over Europe and South America making Dippy probably the most visited dinosaur skeleton(s) in history. 

I've been to the NHM many times and whenever I do visit, I always like to say hello to Dippy. She left the museum for a while and went 'on tour' around the UK while her spot in the great hall was taken by a truly impressive Blue Whale skeleton. But she is now back in a new installation and I'm delighted to see her again. 

It's quite humbling to walk along the length of this creature - all 105 feet of her - and I have a little ritual I go through. Starting at the very tip of her tail, where the bones are the size and shape of cocktail sausages (they used to get stolen regularly so the museum had a box of 'spares'), I start to count. As we move towards the hips the bones soon start to get bigger. By the time I pass Bone 30, they are the thickness of a grown man's arm. And then I reach Bone 37 and stop. 

It's a very special bone for me. But that's because I made it. 

Dippy may be big but the Diplodocus was not, by any measure, the largest of the dinosaurs. Some of its cousins may have been close to twice as long. We'll never be certain of the largest and smallest dinosaurs because only a small fraction of animals ever fossilise, and most of these remains will either never be uncovered, or will be unintentionally destroyed as a result of human activity.

However, just to give you some idea, the Diplodocus is the green dino in this diagram (below - click on it to see a larger version). Compare the size of the 6 feet tall human at bottom left. 

Illustration by KoprX (Creative Commons)

For almost all of her afterlife, Dippy was displayed with her long tail dragging along the ground (which is what made the tail bones so easy to steal). Look in any dinosaur book published prior to around 1985 and that's what you'll see. Here's celebrated palaeoartist Zdenek Burian's famous version from 1942: 

And, when I was a kid, dinosaur books told us that these huge sauropods couldn't even support their own body weight and had to live in lakes, as in this painting by Charles R Knight from 1897. 

But that's the nature of studying dinosaurs; all of the fossils we have represent just a tiny, tiny window on their world. We probably will never get to see 95% of the species that existed back then. Therefore each new discovery sheds some new light on them. In just the past couple of decades, new fossils - especially from China - have changed our understanding. We once thought of dinosaurs as lumbering, stupid, cold-blooded beasts. We now know that they were dynamic predators and herders and we've found enough evidence to be sure that modern birds are descended from one small branch of the dinosaur family tree that survived the mass extinction event 65,000,000 years ago. We have even found dinosaur feathers trapped in amber. 

We've also brought the sauropods out of the swamps and lakes and lifted their tails off the ground. Dippy needed to do the same. And so, in 1993, the NHM decided to raise Dippy's tail; no mean feat considering how many plaster bones were involved. In fact, the weight of the tail made it impossible and so a very good friend of mine, model maker and film special effects expert John Coppinger (website here), was given the job of moulding and recasting every single one in lightweight fibreglass and carbon fibre. 

John was, for many years, a model maker at the museum before moving into film. He was the man, among other things, who sculpted Jabba the Hutt for Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, various creatures for Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, and the Harry Potter films, and aliens and props for Luc Besson's The Fifth Element. This project, however, was a massive undertaking. 

I'm not sure exactly how many bones there were involved but they all had to be moulded, cast, fettled, painted and 'weathered' to match the rest of the existing skeleton. The largest bones, nearest the hips, were as tall as me. John was happy to accept some help from friends and colleagues, myself included, who knew how to mould, cast and paint. Here's a picture I took of another helper, Will, with just some of the smaller bones. 

This picture below shows John (right) and the late and much missed Roy Hale (Left) mounting the new bones onto a rod that, to this day, still supports the tail along with specially designed stand and a cable suspended from the high roof. 

For my small part, I was involved in the making of about six or seven bones but Bone 37 was all mine. It was a very special project to be involved in and I look back on it with nothing but fond memories despite the resin fumes and endless repetition. And, to help me to remember, I have the original Bone 37. 

The originals were so old and so fragile that many didn't survive the moulding process. The museum staff were prepared for that and it was a price they knew they'd have to pay. But at least the new fibreglass bones would be exact replicas and the moulds would allow future copies to be made. Bone 37 did lose a chunk off one of its processes but survived its ordeal pretty well. And to my delight, the museum staff said that I could keep it. It's one of my proudest, if dullest looking, possessions. 

And a few years ago - just before Dippy went off on tour - I was invited by the Museum's publicity people to bring Bone 37 to the NHM to meet its donor. Here they are, reunited. 

If I ever decide to do Mastermind, the closest thing I'll ever have to a specialist subject is dinosaurs. I love those beautiful great brutes, always have done and always will. As a 10 year old kid I came up to London from Cornwall on a school trip and my abiding memory of the event is being stunned, shocked and captivated by Dippy the Diplodocus. She inspired a lifelong interest in me. 

So it's nice to think that, in some small, tiny, glass-reinforced plastic way, I've helped Dippy to go on inspiring people into the 21st century.