150 million years ago, Laurasia
Its huge head hangs down, casting a curved shadow on the moss-covered ground. The dinosaur’s jaws close around the prize. The creature lifts its head, its scales almost delicate, and takes a contented bite of fern.
The time is the late Jurassic period, the supercontinent Laurasia, approximately 85 million years after the reign of the dinosaurs. This animal belongs to a group of large herbivores that spend their days in open landscapes with conifers, ginkgo, horsetail and monkey puzzle trees.
Paleontologists and volunteers gather at a dinosaur dig site near Bluff, Utah.
(Courtesy of Los Angeles County Natural History Museum)
Weighing at least 10 tons, it is much longer than it is tall, and its seemingly endless neck and tail are held parallel to the ground with a surprisingly delicate balance.
A stocky ankylosaurus grazes in the distance. Carnivorous Allosaurus chases prey. A small mammal darts out of the path of its thunderous footsteps.
One day, the dinosaur will be given the name “Gunathalie”. One day, it will travel across continents that don’t yet exist and rest in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
But that is still a long way off. On this day in prehistoric times, Los Angeles is still under a shallow ocean.
It was a long time ago, but sometimes the details are too vague to understand. We don’t know the gender of dinosaurs. We don’t know how they die, whether it’s from illness, injury, predators, or old age. But we know that dinosaurs lived for 30 or 40 years, and eventually there comes a day when dinosaurs die and don’t come back for years.
A starving ecosystem devours its flesh and muscles. When it rains, the dinosaur bones wash into the river and sink to the sandy bottom. The flowing water covers them with a thin blanket of silt.
This is just the beginning.
80 to 50 million years ago, Laramidia
On earth, things live, die, and disappear. However, this dinosaur is exempt from this never-ending cycle of growth and decline because it is covered in layers of sediment.
Thousands of years have passed. These layers of soil are compacted into rocks studded with the remains of forgotten creatures. As more time passes and the organic material within the bone wears away, water from the surrounding rock seeps into its place.
Water contains minerals, and over enough time, over tens of thousands or even millions of years, mineral deposits fill the bone-shaped cavities in the rock, filling the bones of the teeth that once chewed ferns. Create a perfect replica of the tibia that supported the giants.
After the fossil was discovered in 2007, hundreds of scientists and volunteers worked to excavate it for more than a decade.
(Courtesy of Los Angeles County Natural History Museum)
Volcanoes cause a series of chemical changes in the environment that reach underground rocks. This region becomes rich in celadonite, a soft greenish mineral. Over time, the bones hidden in the ground will turn the same emerald color.
Somewhere out there, an asteroid hits, the planet burns, and the age of dinosaurs comes to an end. Gunatalye fossils are already ancient and safely rest in the Earth’s crust.
6 million years ago, North America
Continents move and oceans expand. Unseen forces push up huge rocky plateaus, carving out spectacular landforms that will one day receive names like the Grand Canyon, the Arch, and Monument Valley. Gunatarie also stands up accordingly.
2007, Utah
Time passes. Things happen. Ice Age, cave paintings, nation-states, Bach.
The earth that dinosaurs once walked on is now a vast expanse of solid rock. The place where Gunatalye’s body lies has a name: Colorado Plateau.
The nearest town also has a name. Bluff, Utah. Even that small outpost is miles from the desert where more than a dozen paleontologists hike in search of signs of ancient life.
They find something in the rock that is not a rock, something surprisingly green. They mark the place and agree to come back.
Utah, 2008-2019
The paleontologists, led by Luis Chiappe, director of the Natural History Museum’s Dinosaur Research Institute, returned with generators, tents, a jackhammer and dental picks. When they unearthed the first fossil in the gnat swarm, it turned out to be a damaged leg bone.
Scientists Jonathan Calusa, Fernando, Alyssa Bell, and Pedro Mocho work on excavating fossils at the Gunatali Quarry.
(Courtesy of Los Angeles County Natural History Museum)
There’s another one below. And one more thing. The Earth reveals its secrets as if it was waiting for someone to ask.
Beneath the rocks is a field of fossils, including the remains of camarasaurs, sauropods, crocodiles, anhydrosaurs, and ornithopods that washed into ancient rivers 150 million years ago. Everything is included.
The team returns every summer. The bone bed is littered with gigantic artifacts that no one can quite identify. This mysterious dinosaur is more numerous and better preserved than any other animal.
They nickname the unknown species “Gnatalie” after the pests that plague them during their work.
Each green fossil is wrapped in a plaster jacket and carefully loaded onto a truck for the 700-mile drive to the museum at Expo Park.
2008-2022, Los Angeles
At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, preppers carefully clean, weigh, and catalog each fossil in a room closed to the public. On the bench, he brushes dust from fossilized bones and gently scrapes them away, with the gentle hand of a Jurassic-era dentist cleaning teeth.
For now, Gnatalie is a puzzle waiting to be assembled. But nature doesn’t make this game easy.
Staff must sort through hundreds of fossils. They know that they have discovered some kind of sauropod, a quadruped with a long neck and a long tail. This strange green dinosaur has a barosaurus neck and a diplodocus-like spine. Examination of the quarry’s harvest revealed the long vertebrae of one of the animals, linking the two animals and solving the mystery. Chiappe acknowledged that Gnathalie is indeed an undiscovered species.
Research Casting International in Trenton, Canada, houses a variety of dinosaur fossils.
(Ian Wilms/For the Times)
Dinosaurs are rarely found as whole bodies, and this is no exception. From six fossil skeletons, paleontologists gather representatives of the Gnathalie species. This is their best educated guess as to what the animal looked like. On a computer screen, a dinosaur’s internal structure is put back together for the first time in thousands of years.
This animal has a plan. The museum is opening a new welcome center, and the space needs something big and bold. The answer is in the preparation room. This is the only green dinosaur skeleton in the world.
The 200 bones are packed in wooden boxes, each in its own foam cradle. They are loaded onto trucks with special suspension, and the convoy begins its 4,600-mile journey north with its precious cargo.
2022-2024: Trenton, Canada
Research Casting International’s unassuming warehouse sits on a quiet bay about 160 miles east of Toronto. Outside, beavers are nibbling on plants in the cool water. Inside is a steampunk fossil carnival.
Fossil installation technicians Nevin Dalman and Kevin Krudwig make final adjustments to Gunataly in RCI’s workshop.
(Ian Wilms/For the Times)
In one corner, the lanky, headless skeleton of Quetzalcoatl was about to take flight. Welding sparks fly nearby as workers put the finishing touches on the joints of a replica Tyrannosaurus foot.
A Barosaurus kept in the rotunda of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, a Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops locked in a fight in the main hall of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, all first brought to life here in founder Peter May’s workshop. It has become.
And in the back of the cave-like warehouse, in a safe hangar, Gunatalye stands for the first time in 150 million years.
It measures 75 feet from nose to end, longer than the height of the letters on the Hollywood sign. The oddity of the fossilized sacrum (hip bone) is that the animal’s neck is bent slightly to the left, giving the impression of a dinosaur turning its head curiously toward an unexpected sight. Masu.
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1. Custom metal reinforcement is attached to the dinosaur fossil. 2. Caudal vertebrae of Gunatarie. 3. Mike Payette prepares a temporary Styrofoam skull for Gnathalie. 4. Paleontologist Louis Chiappe inspects the “Natalie” at Research Casting International in Trenton, Ontario, Canada, on March 4, 2023. (Photo by Ian Willms/For The Times)
The hand-forged armature connects approximately 350 bones to the underlying steel skeleton. Two-thirds are real fossils. The rest are 3D-printed replicas of areas where conservation efforts have failed, each hand-painted and textured to match the real bones.
As RCI staff walk through the remaining work to be done on the mount, museum staff visiting from Los Angeles mark the location of the future hall entrance on the warehouse floor with painted tape.
A time-lapse video of a 75-foot-long dinosaur installation on display at the Natural History Museum. (Natural History Museum)
“We want amazing moments that make people want to learn more about the specimens,” says Chris Weisbart, vice president of exhibits.
The dinosaur stands on a specially constructed platform, making it highly visible to the public and keeping its neck and tail out of reach of eager visitors who might want to jump up and touch it.
Nature makes most of the decisions about what dinosaur vehicles look like, but there is a little room for interpretation within scientifically reasonable limits. Chiappe, May and paleontologist Pedro Mocho are currently actively debating the exact location of the ulna. Chiappe has a laptop strapped to his paw so Mocho, watching via Zoom from his office in Lisbon, Portugal, can examine the bones.
“That’s a strange angle,” Mocho finally says. Legs require adjustment.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Chiape said, looking a little perplexed.
“We have a lot of time,” May says with a smile.
2024: Los Angeles
On Sunday, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will open its long-awaited $75 million NHM Commons expansion.
Earlier this year, the museum asked the public to name a new dinosaur. It is not the species that will be given its scientific nickname when the long process of publishing the discovery is complete, but the green dinosaur, the mounted skeleton that people will visit. It belongs only to LA.
Visitors and media tour Gunataly at the new Welcome Center at NHM Commons on November 13th.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
They threw out some options. Sage, native plant and earthy green? Is the olive a symbol of peace? Dinosaur enthusiasts voted to keep the name “Gunathalie,” which stuck as soon as it emerged from Earth.
Gnathalie spends the rest of her fossilized existence welcoming visitors, her head arched gently toward the window and her bony face directed toward the future Lucas Museum.
The height of the hall doors means that the shorter the visitor, the better the vantage point. Children who come to see the green dinosaur will gasp before their parents. Small mammals will once again scurry beneath Gnathalie’s feet.
