Where the Dinosaurs Are
DINOSAUR SKELETONS
AND THE OLD BONE ODORI
(or, my dance with dinosaurs)
First appeared in 2010
Updated June, 2019
I have been drawn to old bones for as
long as I can remember. My favorite dinosaur models have
always been skeletons. While some people may marvel at my kokkalophilia*, I am not alone. A lot
of effort is involved in researching and producing a decent kit
and as much as I enjoy the fruits of such labors, it is very
unlikely that anyone with the skills needed to produce a scale
skeleton would do it just to make one for me. Over
the past fifty years a variety of manufacturers have made models
of skeletons but it has often taken a lot of sweat, toil and tears
to get my hands on those kits. (Blood came later
when I tried to assemble them.) These skeleton-makers
actually believed there would be a market for model skeletons of
prehistoric beasts and that they could sell enough of them to make
it worth their efforts. Unfortunately, that that has often
turned out to be a faulty assumption and the lifespan of most
skeleton model production runs tends to be pretty short with very
limited numbers. What is manufactured is often
very expensive and it can be tough to justify such purchases when
other costs of living and raising a family are considered.
Deferring a skeleton purchase because other things in life take
priority may be the right thing to do, but at the same time, such
patience is likely to be punished with a permanent gap in the
display case. If a kit isn't purchased as soon as it is
available, opportunities to get it in the future may
be few and far between. All of this makes good and
affordable skeleton models tough to find and the hunt for them can
be a significant challenge. For decades I have been on
a quest for good skeletons.
So why do I call it the Old Bone Odori? The Obon (お盆)
is a Japanese Buddhist festival honoring the spirits of one's
ancestors. The Bon-Odori (盆踊り
is a dance performed at the festival to welcome the spirits of the
departed. In the dance there are a lot of steps and
sometimes it seems you are going in circles without getting
anywhere. But in the end, it is the experience that is
supposed to be meaningful, not necessarily where you are when the
music stops. I have a desire to honor the great beasts of
the Mesozoic with tangible representations of their
existence. In my attempts to acquire them, I often feel as
if I am going in circles and sometimes seem to get farther away
from the objects of my desire before being rewarded for those
efforts. Of course, in some cases my my searches end in
frustration and in consolation I can only reflect on having
enjoyed the experience of the hunt. Old Bone Odori? I
think the name seems to fit.
On this page I am trying to describe the history of my desire to
have my own museum. If possible, I want to communicate what
it is about models of fossilized bones that is so fascinating to
me as I review bone and skeleton models that I have seen as well
as those that I actually have in my personal collection. In
reading this page I realize that I can get rather overblown, so if
you just want to look at the pictures, then be my guest! I
will give a list of important links at the end of these
pages. Trying to insert them all over the text can be a
hassle, especially as people often make changes in their websites
that result in broken links and it can be exhausting trying to
keep up with them. Here then, is my dance with the bones of
the dinosaurs.
6/19--->My latest updates are on page 4, where I discuss the
latest explosion of dinosaur skull and skeleton models available.
I also updated the links on page 5.
*The Greek
word for bone is
κόκκαλο, hence lover of bone is κόκκαλοφιλία.
Right
now,
if
you
Google
the
term,
you
will
get
no
results.
Just
wait
and try again soon.
Due to the number of images,
I have divided this webpage into several smaller and more
manageable sections. They are:
PAGE 1
************************
BONE DANCE
OLD BONES I HAVE KNOWN
DINOSAURS: THE EARLY YEARS
SKULLDUGGERY AND SKULLS
THE ITC RESURRECTION
INVADED BY ANTS
PAGE 2
***************************
GLENCOE AND THE PT RENAISSANCE
KAIYODO-ED
FROM A DISTANCE
SOMETHING WICCART THIS WAY COMES
PAGE 3
***************************
SOME HITS AND MISSED OPPORTUNITIES TO COME?
THE GHOST OF ANTS
PAGE 4
**************************
A RASH OF REXES
OZ AND ECHOES
A MID-DECADE BLIP
A NEW GOLDEN AGE DAWNING(?)
PAGE 5
****************************
BUILDING A BETTER STEGOSAURUS
RESIN FATIGUE IN ALLOSAURS
TYRANNOSAURUS EVOLUTION
LINKS
BACK TO THE WHERE
THE DINOSAURS ARE HOMEPAGE
BONE DANCE
The most tangible link we have to dinosaurs is their bones.
Well, there are tracks, eggshells and coprolites, but most
of what we know about about the way they looked and what they ate
comes from what is left of their skeletons. I have been
fascinated by those eerie frameworks since early
childhood. As many others have noted, bones are
real. Imagining extinct animals as living things always
involves a fair amount of speculation and often outright artistic
license. While a lot about muscles and diet can be inferred
from bones, teeth and gastroliths, soft-tissue
reconstructions always involve a lot of extrapolation and
imagination. Even bones are not absolute truth. Many
skeletons are fragmentary. While having the bones of the
right side of an animal makes it pretty easy to reconstruct the
left side if it's missing (as long as it's not a lobster), many
fossilized bones are broken and incomplete. In
many cases, large proportions of the entire skeleton are missing
and filled in with educated guesses. In the early days of
dinosaur paleontology, it was not uncommon to have only teeth and
a few bones. Early reconstruction reimagined theropods as
large lizards and Iguanodon thumbspikes were displayed as
rhinoceros-like horns on the tips of their noses. Poor
Edward Drinker Cope put the head of an Elasmosaurus on the end of
the tail and had a hard time living it down. Often major
portions of skulls are missing and they get "filled in" with
speculation derived from what are probably related beasts, with
those relationships determined by similarities in the rest
of the skeleton. Of course, this can be risky...
think of putting the skull of a bulldog on the reconstructed
skeleton of a greyhound . As long as you realized they are
both dogs, close enough? This sort of error led to putting
the head of a Camarasaurus on the body of an Apatosaurus and
calling the result a Brontosaurus for a very long time. The
old Tyrannosaurus in the American Museum had the feet of an
Allosaurus for years. Most viewers didn't know and wouldn't
have cared, but once the right feet were found, it turned out that
there was a pretty significant difference.
Evolutionary relationships are inferred from bony
structures. That is important when there is no DNA to
analyze, but even bare bones can conceal surprises.
Convergent evolution may make apparent twins of distantly related
cousins. Embryonic bone formation may result in bones that
resemble each other even when the actual frameworks for those
bones came from very different pathways. However, all
such cautions aside, bones are the best we have, so in ossa veritas,
eh?
OLD BONES I HAVE KNOWN
I remember being taken to the Los Angeles County Natural
History Museum sometime in my preschool days and being awestruck
at the skeletons on display. In the mid-1950's, the LA
displays were actually Ice Age mammals, rather than
dinosaurs. However, to a small child, the distinction was
not obvious and those mammoths, giant sloths, bears, camels,
rhinos, Dire wolves and sabertooth cats were utterly
stunning. During our next trip to New York, where
my grandmother lived, this naturally this led to a
visit to the American Museum and its famous halls of fossils.
Now those were
real dinosaurs and walking into their presence felt very much akin
entering a massive cathedral. The way the scaffolds of those
ancient giants towered overhead in the subdued light typical of
old museum displays amid the sounds of footsteps echoing off the
polished floors and the murmurs of visitors admiring those exotic
remnants of the past all felt very reminiscent of the ambiance of
the nave in a towering Gothic church. Well OK, no rose
windows, but I felt the tingle of adrenaline that still flows
today when I enter a museum's hall of paleontology. Of
course, from an academic point of view, bones could simply be
displayed in a case, but I am so glad that museums realize that
assembling them into the representation of complete creatures in
action does a far more effective job of conveying the size and
power of those monsters of the past. OK, it also leads
to a lot of really weird dreams...
AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
1950'S
(image from Next of Kin)
DINOSAURS: THE EARLY YEARS
In the late 1950's the American Museum refurbished their dinosaur
displays and as part of the process of remounting their prized
dinosaur displays, they had scale models sculpted from actual
measurements of several of their more famous mounts. They
were released by the ITC model company and began appearing on the
shelves of toy stores across the country at the same time as many
other dinosaur toys and models became available in a surge of
interest and popularity among us Baby Boomers. While I
had plenty of toy soldiers, cowboy hats and guns along with Davy
Crockett coonskin hats, my favorite possessions were fragile
Miller's waxy prehistoric sculptures from the drugstore and the
Marxian dinosaur playset that lived in the sandbox. Now I could
actually have my own skeletons! I can't remember if I
had to wait for a birthday or holiday to get one of those kits,
but I may have simply made such a fuss that I was able to get it
without the need for a special occasion. My parents
gave me the Tyrannosaurus and my younger brother received the
Stegosaurus. Naturally, my father had to assemble them and
they promptly went on the mantle as the beginning of our own
museum. One of the coolest aspects of those ITC kits was the
pictures on the sides of the box that advertised other models
available in the same series. They included a Triceratops, a
Brontosaurus, a Pterodactyl, a Mammoth and a Dimetrodon. My
brother and I went back again and again to the hobby section in
our local drug store to look for those other kits, but they never
had them. Eventually another company, Palmer Plastics,
released a Brontosaurus and a Mammoth, which we added to our
mantle museum. Those kits were a somewhat smaller scale and
lacked the finish and dynamic pose of the ITC models, but we were
happy to have them anyhow. It wasn't long before it
seemed that the interest of American youth shifted to the space
race and dinosaur models, especially those skeletons, became
extinct as the dinosaurs themselves.
1957 ORIGINAL ITC TYRANNOSAURUS REX
1/25 16 1/2" (42cm)
1957 ORIGINAL ITC STEGOSAURUS
1/25 11" (28cm)
SIDE PANEL FROM BOX SHOWING COMING ATTRACTIONS
PALMER BRONTOSAURUS
PALMER MASTODON
While both of these kits show the skeletons in a striding
pose, they built up in a very static, standing still position.
As the years went by, I managed to hang onto the two ITC
models, even after many falls from their shelves and the loss of
various small parts. The Palmer kits were more fragile and
somehow vanished during various purges of our collections.
My Tyrannosaurus and my brother's Stegosaurus were finally rescued
from a box under my parents' house when I moved into my own
place. At that time I was rekindling my own interest in
dinosaurs and tried reassembling them with some replacement parts
I had to fabricate from fast-drying clay and epoxy. I was
pretty happy with them, but at times I wondered what kind of a job
I could do on those kits if I were to build them as an adult and
even more wistfully, what I could have done with those mysterious
missing models from the sides of the ITC boxes. From time to
time I fantasized that there could be a hobby shop somewhere in a
small town that had a complete set gathering dust on a shelf in
the back.
SKULLDUGGERY AND SKULLS
Sometime in the mid-1980's I received a
pharmaceutical-sponsored glossy bulletin about classy things that
should appeal to high earners, such as doctors. At that time
I was not a particularly high earner and most of the fancy cars,
luxury resorts and high-end liquor it advertised were well out of
my price range and held little interest for me. However,
there was one thing that grabbed my attention. It was a
life-sized mounted skull of a Smilodon, marketed by a new company
called Skullduggery. While not quite the real thing, it was
cast from a real skull and it was gorgeous. My wife actually
indulged me and bought it for me as a birthday present. It
is still a focal point of my living room decor. Skullduggery
also sold a beautiful cast of a huge Tyrannosaurus tooth which I
bought, and they offered several dinosaur skulls, including a
Tyrannosaurus and a Triceratops. I was intrigued, but never
felt as if I had to have them. While nicely done, they were
scaled-down sculptures rather than casts. They were each
cast in one piece, so detail was lacking in the jaw articulation
and teeth, but above all, they were expensive. The
Triceratops cost more than the Smilodon. I am not always
sure why some things appeal to me and not others. The
Sabertooth looked and felt real. It was worth the space it
occupied on the shelf. The dinosaur skulls looked nice, but
at their smaller scale, nobody would think they were the real
thing and yet they were still big enough to occupy a lot of room
on the bookcase. It's sort of an odd calculus, but somehow
it makes some sense to me. In the end, I decided to keep
waiting for different dinosaurs.
SKULLDUGGERY SMILODON FATALIS LIFE SIZE!
13 1/2" (34 cm) long Fangs are 6" (15 cm)
SKULLDUGGERY TYRANNOSAURUS SCULPTURE 10" (~25 CM) LONG
Image from
DINOSAUR!
page 86
Deinonychus skull from 3/4" carved oak plank 1993
As it turns out, I was just a little too impatient. During
the second half of the 1990's a number of resin casts and
sculptures appeared in catalogs and on the Internet, and many of
these are still available today. Some were life-sized and
others were scaled down. In addition to many carnivore
skulls there have been complete pterosaur skeletons and even full
sized mounts of complete dinosaur skeletons. Many of
the skulls tended to have a rather rough and fractured surface to
give the appearance of a completely prepared fossil, although that
resulted in the loss of a lot of suture and muscle attachment
detail. In a lot of the examples I saw, the mandibles
were glued in an open position and it was obvious that even if
separated, they would not line up particularly well with the
maxillae. These difficulties were, of course, excused
as reflecting the appearance of a fossil after being distorted by
millions of years of burial. There was also a line of bronze
skeleton sculptures that looked very dynamic, but given the manner
in which they were manufactured with a blowtorch, it seemed that
the idea behind them was to present an artful interpretation of a
skeleton rather than an accurate recreation. A significant
factor for me was that all of these were made to be displayed
right out of the box. I always enjoyed assembling and
painting kits rather than just buying something after someone else
had done all the work. These recreations left no real place
for me to invest any of my time, effort and personal vision in how
they should look. Whatever interest I had in them was
usually stifled by the price. Most of the smaller skulls
started at over $200 and larger skulls, such as an Allosaurus or
Tyrannosaurus, went into thousands of dollars. Had I any
interest in the complete skeletons, they commanded prices up to
hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were designed
primarily for museums, but some of the sales people I talked to
said that there were private parties who had no problem springing
for them. This was the era of the dot-com bubble and
apparently it was trendy for young billionaires to have a building
with a Ferrari parked in front and a Tyrannosaurus in the foyer or
a Tylosaurus suspended from the ceiling. I sometimes wonder
what happened to a lot of that stuff after the crash, but then I
don't have the shelf space.
ACROCANTHOSAURUS LIFE-SIZE
$120,000!
BLACK HILLS INSTITUTE OF PALEONTOLOGY
RHAMPHORHYNCHUS GEMMINGI LIFE-SIZE ~1 METER
TAYLOR MADE FOSSILS
ANHANGUERA BLITTERSDORFI LIFE-SIZE
~3 METERS $5,900
TAYLOR MADE FOSSILS
In 1998 I went to the Mad
Model Party in Pasadena. I found a bin of seconds from
KronenOsteo BoneClones, a producer of resin skulls cast from a
variety of species, both extant and extinct. After some
searching, I found a damaged Dinictus cranium and after a few
more minutes of digging, a jaw that fit. There were a
lot of flaws that caused it to fail Kronen's usual exacting
standards, but some extra Milliput and a lot of Dremel time
made it pretty displayable. It isn't a dinosaur, but
with teeth like that, it doesn't have to be.
DINICTUS
For anyone who really
wants a skeleton to call his (or her) own, there is no
place like the Arizona Fossil and Mineral Show, held
annually in Tucson. Dealers and shoppers come from
all over the world and practically anything is available
for a price. Not all of it legal, but they keep
trying to clean it up... Many of the cast skeletons
I mentioned above are available as well as many real
skeletons. All in all, it is an amazing experience,
assuming you have the budget and the shelf space to
display what you can haul away.
IN THE BALLROOM AT THE INNSUITES HOTEL 2005
MY CHIHUAHUA WONDERS HOW LONG IT WILL TAKE HIM TO CHEW
THIS STUFF 2006
THE ITC RESURRECTION
In the spring of 1992
I was browsing in a local hobby shop and came across a
Glencoe Tyrannosaurus rex and next to it, a
Stegosaurus. I quickly recognized them as
re-issues of the long lost ITC kits. As I
already had both of the models, I didn't feel
compelled to buy them, but it occurred to me that if
those were available, I might actually have a chance
to get the rest of the kits in the series. I
asked the clerk at the hobby shop if any other
dinosaur skeleton kits were available and, to my
delight, he looked in his catalog and told me that
there was a Brontosaurus. That was the one that had
eluded me as a child! He said he would order it
and it should come with his next shipment in a couple
of weeks. It didn't happen. After a
couple of months the guy at the shop gave me the
address he had for Glencoe and told me to contact them
myself. I sent a letter asking about the
Brontosaurus and also inquired about the other models
in the series. In a few weeks (this was still in
the the days of snail mail) I received a reply from
Glencoe saying that while they did indeed make the
kit, they didn't sell directly to the public.
They suggested that I could buy it through the
Squadron mail order catalog. Sadly, however,
they told me that those other models had never been
produced. That portion of my dream flickered and
dissolved like a mirage. My grief was assuaged
when Squadron came through with the long sought
Brontosaurus and after more than thirty years I
finally had my hands on that prize! I
carefully assembled it, cleaning molding seams and
avoiding the glue burns that afflicted my childhood
efforts. Instead of the kit-supplied base, I
mounted it on a rock my wife found in Moab and I
proudly put it on display in my office.
INVADED BY ANTS
In the early 1990's there was somewhat of a harmonic
convergence of dinosauria. Jurassic Park was published in
1990 and while I didn't read it right away, others did and a
groundswell of interest in dinosaurs developed in popular
entertainment, books, and magazines. Then
Ants invaded my life. One evening in late1992 I glanced at
the classified ads in Natural History and to my amazement saw an
advertisement for an Allosaurus skeleton kit. While growing
up, I had always considered Tyrannosaurs cooler than Allosaurs as
they were bigger and more advanced, occupying the crown of
dinosaur creation, as it were. The Allosaurus was more my
brother's type of beast, somewhat smaller and more lithe and in
any case, he was usually willing to pick something else as a
favorite just because that's what he did. (He could probably
cite other reasons.) When we played with our Marx dinosaur
set, I always gravitated toward the Tyrannosaur and he usually
picked up the Allosaurus. Nonetheless, the picture in the ad
definitely grabbed me. It was a very dynamic looking pose
and I began to think that even if I already had a Tyrannosaurus,
an Allosaurus would be great. I sent a letter asking for
more details and the reply was a bigger picture of the model and a
brief note explaining that it was a resin kit with around 150
pieces produced by a dentist who made the original as a
hobby. I'm not really sure what I was asking for except for
a reason to spend almost $200 on a model, which seemed like a lot of money for a kit, not
to mention one made by a company I had never heard of
before. Still, the idea of having a skeleton model in which
every single bone was a separate piece was intriguing and I
decided to go for it and sent a check to Albuquerque. In a
few weeks I received a letter telling me that demand was higher
than expected and there might be a delay in getting the
model. After the Brontosaurus I had become used
to waiting, but experience didn't make me any happier about it.
Still, I was busy with a lot of other things, so I didn't mind
waiting all that much. But when a year passed, I finally
wrote a somewhat cranky letter asking how many times the inland
ocean would rise and recede before my Allosaurus would
arrive. Within a couple of days I got an apologetic phone
call and a few days after that, the kit landed on my
doorstep. Ants was a small operation and someone assumed
that my early order had been filled a long time ago. In
apologizing for the delay, they offered me a free kit of the next
skeleton they would produce. At the time, Ants was
considering a whale, a modern horse and a couple of dinosaurs,
including Stegosaurus and Deinonychus. Over the next few
years, Ants made a lot of interesting hominid skulls and produced
a line of dinosaur skulls, but I kept holding out for the next
skeleton. Unfortunately, it was never made. I'll say
more about the skulls a bit later. The Allosaurus was a
fabulous model. In assembling it I learned a lot about
theropod anatomy and gained a fair amount of experience in dealing
with the assembly of a resin kit. Actually, it gave a false
sense of security in dealing with resin as every piece fit
perfectly, an experience I have rarely had since with resin
kits. The kit was molded in a bone-ish off-white color and I
left it that way. It is interesting how the mind
works. The real skeletons I had seen in museums and books
were heavily stained fossils, mostly shades of brown and black,
but somehow in my mind I always saw them as white, just like my
old ITC models. At that time, even my recently acquired
Brontosaurus was still white. Whatever color it was, I was
delighted with my Allosaurus and hoped that more model skeletons
were on the way. By the end of 1993, with Jurassic Park as
one of the most successful films in history, there were a lot of
dinosaur models hitting the shelves in local hobby shops, but
despite the drama of the movie's climax when the Tyrannosaurus and
raptors battle it out in the Park Museum's displays, none of them
were skeletons.
ANTS ALLOSAURUS 1/12 26" (66 cm)
DETAIL IN SPINE, RIBS AND SACRUM IS VERY IMPRESSIVE
on
to page 2
