Cleaning Up After the Dinosaurs

By Anthony Todd in Miscellaneous on Mar 5, 2009 5:45PM

What happens when a dinosaur gets mounted in a museum? Well, it gets taken out of the ground, cleaned with brushes and dental drills, inventoried and arranged. Fiberglass molds are made, it gets fitted with metal rods for support and, eventually, it’s put on public display with great fanfare and probably some wine and cheese. But then what? It sits there. For years and years and years.

Somehow, it never crossed our minds that Sue, the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever discovered and the pride of the Field Museum, ever got dirty. Not just a little bit dirty - filthy! Imagine: all the dust and grime from millions and millions of visitors, floating up into the air and landing on Sue. Clearly, it has to be cleaned, and if you’re lucky, you might get a chance to see it. Steve Johnson, of the Trib, got a chance to watch.

“… one day last week, Bill Simpson, a high-ranking Field paleontologist, was standing on an UpRight MX 19 micro-scissor lift, 61/2 feet in the air, doing housework … The only one to clean Sue in its Field tenure, Simpson, manager of the geology department's 100,000-specimen fossil vertebrates collection, has settled on doing it with a portable vacuum cleaner, set to blow rather than suck, and a synthetic feather duster.”

A Dust Buster and a feather duster. We expected them to break out the space-age technology and use lasers or ultrasonic vibrations. The doors would lockdown, the lights would dim and the gamma-ray-gun wielding scientists, clad in hazmat suits, would rappel down from the balconies. Sigh - all of our illusions are destroyed. Not to mention the fact that, if paleontologists are to be believed, we’re dusting the ancient ancestors of birds with the remains of… other birds. Scary.