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Monday, December 17, 2007

See "Gordo" at the ROM

DINOs are back at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (Canada). The new James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs has just opened and the star attraction is a Barosaurus fossil. That's a drawing of Barosaurus above, courtesy of Mike Skrepnick. A complete description of the exhibit can be found on the ROM website [Natural History Galleries.
One of the highlights is “Gordo”, the Museum's massive 27-metre (90-foot) Barosaurus skeleton, the largest dinosaur on permanent display in Canada and one of only two Barosaurus skeletons on display in the world. Several of the dinosaurs on display are long-time ROM residents that have been remounted for the new display including Albertosaurus, Corythosaurus and a number of hadrosaurs that are easily recognizable by their distinctive tubular head crest, some measuring over one metre long. The most well-known hadrosaur, Parasaurolophus, a very rare species, is one of the ROM's best and most complete specimens. Other featured specimens on display include the full skeleton cast of a Tyrannosaurus rex and a real Triceratops skull.


[Image Credit: Barosaurus drawing courtesy of Mike Skrepnick, used with his permission.]

[Hat Tip: Brian Switek at Laelaps (Meet "Gordo" the Barosaurus)]

2 comments :

Anonymous said...

Shouldn't he be "Bary" or "Barry", rather than "Gordo"?

Anonymous said...

Karen; The specimen was named Gordo because it was initially acquired by paleontologist Gordon Edmunds at the Carnegie Museum in PA. It was initially intended to go on display in 1970 but this never happened (although, as chance would have it, the Carnegie also just revamped its dino exhibit). Somehow the bones got to the ROM but no one knew there were there until David Evans stumbled across a reference to them and started poking around in storage, and once they fossils were found he named them "Gordo" in honor of the previous curator of the bones.