At the Field Museum, the prey has replaced the predator.
Chicagoans this week are finally getting to meet the dinosaur that has kicked Sue upstairs: It’s a red-hued, skinless behemoth that you’ll be able to look in the eye from the museum’s second-floor balcony.
Plans have been public for months about the arrival of the titanosaur from Argentina, a plant eater that many believe to be the largest land animal ever. The T. rex skeleton Sue was dismantled in February and has been rebuilt in a new, second-floor home, awaiting the construction of a surrounding exhibition.
And Wednesday, workers began erecting Máximo, the name chosen for the museum’s Patagotitan mayorum skeleton cast. In the morning it was ruddy piles of bone segments on the museum floor and by Friday it will stretch 122 feet from head to tail and 28 feet from floor toward the ceiling of Stanley Field Hall, the showpiece in an ambitious makeover of the lakefront natural-history temple’s cavernous main room.
They worked fast. By lunch break the crew from the Patagonian museum that supplied the fossil replica had the four legs installed, bolted into metal plates that were themselves bolted to the floor, plus a tree trunk-sized section of vertebrae mounted atop one leg pair. The spider-legged crane that lifted the parts into the air looked a little like a museum specimen itself.
Visitors who happened to be there, including a choir of home-schooled teenagers from Rochester, Minn., marveled at the size and, of course, took videos.
“Maximus?” asked Jacob Janicek, a fourth grader from Stickney on a field trip.
“Máximo,” corrected his teacher.
“It’s really cool that it’s the biggest dinosaur,” the boy said, before he and his group headed off to go check out Sue in its new digs, officially opening early next year.
As the Minnesotans sang peaceable tunes nearby, seemingly most of the museum staff came by to watch the installation, from President and CEO Richard Lariviere to much of the paleontology team to myriad other workers.
“It is a strangely emotional moment,” said Jaap Hoogstraten, director of exhibits.
“Isn’t this fun?” asked Lariviere.
So much so that, earlier, museum maintenance worker Deweese Jackson had stopped by to tell scientists gathered around the “bones,” “That part right there, that reminds me of ‘The Flintstones.”
One section of the backbone was so big that it would not fit in the museum’s freight elevator. It had to be brought in by crane through the south doors early Wednesday. The titanosaur’s rear femur alone, its thigh bone, is eight feet tall. Its hip bones are like ceremonial gongs.
“The size of the bones is simply mind-boggling,” said Peter Makovicky, the museum’s curator of dinosaurs. “Seeing a single bone is stunning. Seeing the whole skeleton just makes my jaw drop.”
He’s got a point, and not only as the discoverer of a couple of new species that will be showcased when the Field opens “Antarctic Dinosaurs” next month.
Not only will that large exhibit debut June 15, but Stanley Field Hall will be transformed by then, too, in a 125th anniversary updating paid for by a $16.5 million gift from Chicago philanthropist Kenneth C. Griffin.
Already the first-of-their-kind hanging plant gardens have been put in place at the hall’s south end. Until the ferns and such grow in — cretaceous-era plants, naturally — they look more like spaceships than garden displays.
And next week, a flock of flying prehistoric creatures will be brought in and lifted in place in the airspace around Máximo, including one with a 35-foot wingspan.
Meanwhile, Sue sits alone in the former 3D theater that is becoming bespoke exhibition space and a stop along the pathway of the “Evolving Planet” exhibit that showcases the museum’s dinosaurs. It’s got some scientific updates to the skeleton, most notably the addition of a wishbone and installation of gastralia, or belly ribs, that give an impression of more mass.
Even amid empty space, the animal (named after its female discoverer but itself of unknown sex; the museum now officially prefers “they” and them” as its pronouns) already looks fiercer and more menacing than it did during two decades in the main hall.
“I always thought Sue was swallowed up in this massive space,” said Lariviere, in Stanley Field Hall. “You finally get a sense of what a massive, terrifying animal that must have been.”
But the new star, clearly, will be Máximo, a Spanish-language name meaning “maximum” that suits the species’ heritage and that Field marketers are hoping will resonate with Latinos here. The T-shirts that spell out the name along an outline of Máximo’s body are already available on the museum website.
“It’s a great, one-two punch,” said Ray DeThorne, chief marketing officer, referring to the museum’s two named skeletons. “Dinosaurs, that’s sort of the bread-and-butter here.”
Bringing in a Patagotitan became alluring to Field executives, he said, as the museum thought about 2018 as its 125th anniversary year and as it learned of the Griffin donation.
Not only should its size help fill the space better than Sue, which is about one third the length, but as a recent discovery, it makes an important point about science and the museum itself.
“Science never sleeps,” DeThorne said. “We’re trying to be less reliant on just the new exhibition.” A new emphasis: “We’re a world-class scientific institution with a really nice showroom.”
A similar looking Patagotitan replica went up at New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 2016, one based, in fact, on the same set of 3D models of bones at the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio (MEF) in Trelew, Argentina.
There, the animal’s neck spills out of the fourth-floor fossil exhibit welcome room and into an adjacent one, where the elevators let guests off.
“That gallery was the one visited the least. Security guards used to joke about it,” said Mark Norell, paleontology division chair at the New York museum. “But now it is packed with people. … It’s always great to have new dinosaurs on display.”
Chicago’s Patagotitan is a reddish sort of animal, not because that might have been its color when roaming southern hemisphere rainforests, but to suggest the clay soil that lent its coloration to the fossilized bones of the species, discovered near Trelew, in southern Argentina, in 2014.
The discovery was quite a story, said Florencia Gigena, the MEF communications director on hand in Chicago during the installation. “Do you know gaucho?” she asked.
Essentially, an Argentinian cowboy saw what he thought was a round stone that he intended to dig up and use for a rustic version of bocce, she explained. He soon realized this wasn’t any rounded rock poking up out of the arid terrain.
“Do you know Arizona?” she asked, describing the area of the discovery. “Exactly the same.”
Museum paleontologists were called in and learned the gaucho had found a thighbone of what turned out to be this new, massive species. Specialists eventually discovered 228 bones from seven animals at different levels, each specimen about a million years apart, she said.
Scientists think their fate was sealed by their perhaps 70-ton weight and the soft ground on which they stood, along a prehistoric waterway. “You know La Brea?” she asked, referring to the fateful Los Angeles tarpits. “Perhaps it is the same.”
MEF has put the two replicas out into the world, but does not yet have the space in its own museum to show one, she said. An expansion is being built, as are traveling exhibitions that will showcase the discovery, which has also been the subject of a David Attenborough BBC documentary.
“We are super excited,” she said, noting that Friday’s completion date for Máximo is the Argentinian equivalent of the Fourth of July. “For us, this is showing our culture, our science and working with a great museum like the Field Museum and a great city like Chicago.”
Patagotitan, officially named in a 2017 paper, is one of the sauropods, a wide-ranging group of long necked herbivores. Some think it is the biggest animal yet found on the planet, some that it is one of three sauropod species, two from Argentina, one from China, so similar in size that no clear champion emerges.
“To be fair, there are a couple of other giant dinosaurs out there,” Norell said. “This is really at the upper limits of any terrestrial animal we know of.”
What is indisputable is that Patagotitan is the one for which the most complete fossil record exists, giving it, perhaps, the firmest claim to its size. (An actual thigh bone on loan from MEF will be displayed alongside Máximo for two years.)
The animal lived roughly 100 million years ago and was uncovered in farm fields belonging to the Mayo family (hence the name mayorum). Máximo is a composite of the bones that have been found, with scientific interpolation being used to fill in the rest.
“There never will be a display of the original, because there isn’t one,” said Lariviere, noting that, to a degree, a skeleton like Sue, the most complete T. rex ever found, warps people’s expectations. “This is science’s attempt to tell us what it looked like.”
But while Sue may be both an apex predator and an apex artifact, a replica like Máximo has its own advantages. Cast out of fiberglass and polyurethane over a metal structure from molds made from laser-generated images, it’s an accurate likeness.
And its replaceability means people will be allowed to walk right under, and even touch, the “bones.” In fact, the leg bones are cast with color in the resins so that the red shading won’t wear away as visitors rub this new dinosaur — out of curiosity or just to say, “Welcome.”
UPDATE: This is a more detailed version of a story that ran earlier today.
sajohnson@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @StevenKJohnson
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