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American Museum of Natural History
Course: American Museum of Natural History > Unit 1
Lesson 4: Dinosaur fossils- Fossil preparation
- What Is a fossil?
- How do we know where to look for dinosaur fossils?
- How do we know where to look for dinosaur fossils?
- How are dinosaur fossils discovered and collected?
- How are dinosaur fossils discovered and collected?
- How are dinosaur fossils prepared in the laboratory?
- How are dinosaur fossils prepared in the laboratory?
- Preparing dinosaur fossils
- Inside the Collections: Paleontology and the Big Bone Room
- Can we clone extinct dinosaurs from DNA preserved in their fossils?
- Can we clone dinosaurs from DNA?
- Barnum Brown: The man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex
- Quiz: Dinosaur Fossils
- Exploration Questions: Dinosaur Fossils
- Answers to Exploration Questions: Dinosaur Fossils
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Inside the Collections: Paleontology and the Big Bone Room
Paleontology Collections Manager Carl Mehling gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the Big Bone Room, which houses some of the largest items in the Paleontology collection. Its holdings include one of the largest complete limb bones in the world: the 650-pound thigh bone of the long-necked, plant-eating dinosaur Camarasaurus. More than 3 million specimens make up the Museum's world-class paleontology collections, and only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time. The rest are stored behind the scenes, where they continue to be studied by Museum scientists and their colleagues. Created by American Museum of Natural History.
Want to join the conversation?
- How many types of dinosaurs are there ?(1 vote)
- About 540 types. There are still about 800 more left to discover.(just a prediction)(1 vote)
- what is the exact cause of the DME?(1 vote)
- There were many reasons all at once which were killing the Dinosaurs off one being the volcanic eruptions that were crippling them along with viruses. Dinosaurs were known to be great adapters so they woulda survived this if not for a giant meteor which wiped most of them out by tsunamis earthquakes even more volcanic eruptions and the rest of the meteor that was shot back up and rained down on everything, The meteor caused a cloud that blocked the sky for monthes and killed the remaning crops that lived from the meteor which killed off the remaning herbavores then killing off the carnivores who all ate eachother .(1 vote)
- Doesn't the plaster make the bone heavier and harder to carry?(1 vote)
- where is the largest dinosaur museum ?(0 votes)
- is it rare to find whole dino's? how deep are they in the ground? how long does it take to dig them out?(1 vote)
Video transcript
[MUSIC PLAYING] >>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. [MUSIC PLAYING]