It’s been four years in the making, Ray Vodden- the Boonshoft’s Palentologist tells us, but now the Paleo Lab is now open. Located inside the Eco Eatery, the lab includes fossil specimens, a dig pit, large foam dino puzzles, and the opportunity to see our paleontology crew work on articulating and constructing our hadrosaur skeleton!

Ray leads a team of volunteers that are working on restoring a hadrosaur, lovingly called TC, after Tim Clelland, the property owner where the skeleton was found in Butte County South Dakota. It was excavated in 2001, purchased at auction by Dayton resident Peter Thaler for $100,000, then donated to the Dayton Society of Natural History.

Ray says they have 209 bones of the 275 the “duck-billed” dinosaur had. They use a Sandblasters to help clean the bone and remove the rocks formed around them. Many of the smaller bones disappeared in the blow out of the levies where the skeleton was found. His team is working using foam and car bondo to recreate the missing bones. He is currently working on an upper leg bone that he thinks will take him about 3 weeks to finish. Ray estimates it will take about 4 years to recreate the bones and attach to a support system that will eventually move TC into an interactive display.

In the cases there are Mosasaur heads, an extinct, large marine reptile who breathed air, were powerful swimmers, and were well-adapted to living in the warm, shallow inland seas prevalent during the Late Cretaceous period, over 66 million years ago and casts of footprints from other dinosaurs of that period.