Field Museum welcomes world’s largest predatory dinosaur
The Field Museum has a new dinosaur, one that is both larger and a better swimmer than Sue.
A 46-foot-long Spinosaurus cast was suspended in the main hall of the Field Museum on Friday, pulled off the ground by wires hanging from the glass ceiling.
It’s a display of the world’s largest predatory dinosaur, surpassing the museum’s famous T. rex fossil Sue by 6 feet. The Spinosaurus was semiaquatic, hunting prey in rivers.
For this reason, exhibit developer Benjamin Miller said they decided to pose the cast in a swimming position to “feel like you’re a fish and this big river monster is swimming down at you.”
The Spinosaurus is popular with kids, Miller said, so it was natural for the Field Museum to bring one to Chicago.
“At some point in the last 10 years, every kid who likes dinosaurs decided that Spinosaurus is their favorite,” he said. When Miller leads tours with kids, someone always asks where they can see a Spinosaurus. In the past, Miller has had to tell them there isn’t one anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. But the answer will be different now.
“This will be the first one outside Japan on permanent display, so hopefully it will make a lot of kids happy,” he said.
One of these happy kids was 7-year-old Benjamin Olsen Garcia, whose family travels from Madison, Wisconsin, several times a year to the museum. His family came specifically to see the Spinosaurus on Thursday. “I have a Spinosaurus tooth at my house,” he said. “It’s really cool and interesting to see an actual Spinosaurus.”
Dinosaurs are the museum’s most-loved ambassadors, said Field Museum president Julian Siggers.
“They open a gateway to science that, for many of our visitors, prompts lifelong learning and a life of curiosity and wonder,” he said.
This particular dinosaur model was also the result of international collaboration, Siggers said.
The Spinosaurus cast was based on the fossils housed at the Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco. The fossils were discovered in 2008 by a team in the Saharan Desert, including Field Museum researcher Matteo Fabbri.
Fabbri said the 2008 discovery changed scientists’ understanding of just how much the Spinosaurus spent swimming.
It has dense bones that made swimming easier, for example, unlike birds or other predatory dinosaurs that have hollow bones. Those bones would have helped it submerge itself underwater in pursuit of prey.
“It was the first time we had a smoking gun to say that this dinosaur was spending a lot of time swimming in water,” Fabbri said.
He said it was amazing to see the Spinosaurus lifted up into its new home. The cast was made in Italy, then shipped to the museum by plane.
“Four a.m., we started mounting the specimen, and it was a great, great feeling to see that everything went well,” Fabbri said.
The Spinosaurus cast in Stanley Field Hall will be the centerpiece of Dino Fest from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. June 10, with dinosaur trivia games, a poetry station, a book fair and presentations from the Field’s dinosaur curator Jingmai O’Connor and paleoartist Ted Rechlin; at the Field Museum, 1400 S. DuSable Lake Shore Drive; www.fieldmuseum.org
