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>>CARL MEHLING: This is
called the Big Bone Room,
for obvious reasons.
This is where we keep
the oversized collection
of dinosaur fossils.
For big specimens like
this they basically
have to be out on open shelves
just because of their size.
Everything in this
room, basically,
is real dinosaur material
from mostly North America.
And it spans the time of
non-bird dinosaur time
from about 210 million years
ago to 65 million years ago.
The stuff in here is
for research, generally.
Sometimes some of it comes out
for display, temporary display,
but for the most part this is
the raw material from which all
the science that everybody
learns about regarding
dinosaurs, where it comes from.
So this specimen is a sauropod
bone from the late Jurassic
of North America.
And you can see these
grooves in here,
and this edge, which really
should be a smooth line
is all torn apart.
That's tooth mark from some
gigantic meat-eater that was
making a meal out of this guy.
Only 0.02% of our Vertebrate
Paleontology Collection
is on display.
All the rest is in storage
rooms on site behind the scenes.
That's the beak of a
Triceratops, the bone
part of the beak.
In life it was covered with
keratin like your fingernails
and would have extended a little
bit past the end of the bone.
This is a scale
model of the skeleton
of T. rex that was built 100
years ago to try to figure out
how to mount the real specimen.
A cast of the same
model was used
to figure out how to mount
the one that was rebuilt
in the renovation of the 1990s.
This is the left
femur of Camarasaurus,
one of the long neck plant
eaters from the Jurassic.
And as far as I know, it's the
biggest bone in the collection.
We just weighed a
little while ago
because it's going to be
going on a temporary exhibit
for a couple of months,
and it's about 650 pounds.
Some times people
ask me, you know,
when will science be finished
with these specimens.
And we never really will
be because there's always
going to be either a new line
of inquiry that nobody's ever
thought of, or a new
technique to which you
can subject the specimens
to get other information.
It's easy to think
of this collection
as New York's, or
America's, but it's actually
part of the entire world's
collection of natural history
specimens.
And we are a repository that
takes care of that forever.
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