Where the Dinosaurs Are
DINOSAUR SKELETONS AND
THE OLD BONE ODORI
(or, my dance with dinosaurs)
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.
*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
LINKS
PAGE 5
****************************
BUILDING A BETTER STEGOSAURUS
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, 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 Skulduggery. 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
