Dinosaurs on display

Natural History Museum staff bring prehistory to life

The Green Nautilus is about to open its doors and share its secrets. The Green Nautilus, otherwise known as the new Shanghai Natural History Museum in the Jing'an Sculpture Park on Shanhaiguan Road, will have on display some 10,800 exhibits spread over its 45,086 square meters. It is three times the size of the old Yan'an Road East museum which had been a drawing card since it opened in 1956. The old museum's collection will make up just one third of the new building's exhibits.

The green nautilus is so called because in shape and color it resembles a nautilus, a shellfish that has existed unchanged on the planet for at least 500 million years.

Inside Shanghai's Nautilus, which will open later this year, visitors will find some vivid and exciting illustrations of the origins and evolution of life on Earth. And some of the fossil and dinosaur specimens on show are representative of life forms that have been around as long as the intricately designed Nautilus itself.

Prime condition

These rare, delicate and priceless objects are kept in prime condition by a skilled and dedicated maintenance and repair team.

With the new display space about to open, 60-year-old Di Yeli, and his apprentice Miao Kejia have been busy assembling skeletons and specimens, making sure that the dinosaurs and other creatures are seen at their most lifelike.

"We have assembled and dismantled the triceratops four times to date. We had to first dismantle it because the flooring was incomplete in that area and then we moved it and reassembled it three more times because it didn't look so good or it didn't fit in with the other displays next to it," Di explained as he and other staff struggled to get the 3-meter triceratops skeleton into position.

The triceratops is an expensive detailed large-scale version bought from the US. Some of these skeletons can cost up to $1 million, depending on the size, detail and materials used.

"Fortunately this one is just a model and we just need to connect the parts - the whole process should take about 20 minutes if a few of us work on it together." He didn't want to have to reassemble this one again because repeated dismantling and assembling can cause damage.

Not all of the exhibits here are that easy to assemble. One way of assembling dinosaur skeletons is by connecting the bones to a central support. The other way is to build the display on a base - a method usually used when the museum is displaying actual fossils. Both techniques require considerable skill.

Di recalls the first time he assembled a fossil specimen of a megalonyx, a now extinct giant ground sloth that stood 3 meters tall and weighed a ton. When they opened the crates from the US Di and his team found the dismantled bones, some photographs of how it should look when assembled and instructions only in English.

Different techniques

"We spent a lot of time figuring out how to assemble it. The material it was made from and the display techniques were quite different from domestically made models. The bones could not be glued to the skeleton but were attached without obvious connections. But the effect of this display was much better than anything we had seen before," said Di. After that first encounter and a lot of practice on other specimens, he became an expert in assembling tricky skeletons.

"It's not easy to decide how to arrange a display. For visitors, these creatures look quite natural but the pose is the result of trial and error and several attempts. We have to keep adjusting the spinal supports several times before one is finalized," Miao Kejia said.

The museum has bought some 50 dinosaur skeletons from abroad for its new venue. At present Di is racking his brains to find a way of having the skeletons of two giant extinct marine reptiles, sauropterygia and polycotylus, hanging in midair. "My boss thinks that setting these on ordinary displays wouldn't be right. But suspending these in midair on single strands of wire will not be easy."

It is difficult and there are challenges assembling dinosaur skeletons from overseas but it is even more difficult and complicated preparing actual fossils from China. These displays are usually constructed from hundreds of tiny bones and take the team ages to complete. They have to be extra careful here as well - repeated handling of these delicate bones can damage them and these cannot be repaired although sometimes a replica can be created to replace a damaged piece.

Di has been working at Shanghai Natural History Museum since 1979 and is due to retire shortly - he is happy that his last few weeks are spent preparing for the new museum.

One of the great treasures of the old museum was the 23-meter skeleton of the giant long-necked dinosaur Sichuan Hechuan mamenchisaurus, which had stood proudly 9 meters upright for years in the museum even before Di began working there. Although the old skeleton is now retiring along with the old museum, Di and his team have assembled a replica. It has taken them about four years to recreate this using fiber-reinforced plastic to make the bones of the giant creature.

"Compared with the old model which was made of plaster of Paris, the new version is a lot lighter. And we have threaded the bones together from the inside not the outside as the old model was. It will look a lot better," said Di. The new dinosaur exhibit will be one of the last works of his career.