By Sue Vorenberg
Tribune Reporter
Spencer Lucas peeks his head over a Dumpster-sized crate as though he were a 6-year-old looking into his favorite toy box.
The New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science curator quickly spots what he's looking for but can't reach it. He backs up, looks around for help and then eagerly peeks in again.
In there is the replica skull of a creature called a seismosaurus - a 150 million-year-old, 110-foot-long dinosaur, the longest yet found by paleontologists.
A half-hour later, with the aid of museum staff, he frees the head from the surrounding pile of foot bones and ribs and holds it up proudly.
"Behold the head of a 30-ton animal," he said Wednesday. "It's about the size of a basketball - bigger than a breadbox. It's amazing. How did something this big feed itself through this tiny head?"
The bones are were cast for the museum by Prehistoric Animal Structures Inc., a Canadian company specializing in dinosaur molds. They are part of a $400,000 completely redone Jurassic exhibit slated to open at the Albuquerque Old Town museum Aug. 7.
The bones might have been built elsewhere, but the plant-eating seismosaurus is all New Mexican. The original fossils - which will be displayed alongside the cast - were found near San Ysidro in 1979.
"This is a native New Mexican in all senses of the word," Lucas said. "But when it lived here, New Mexico was a tropical forest, with huge rivers and lakes. It was at sea level. It probably looked sort of like parts of the Amazon do today."
The museum helped Prehistoric Animal Structures build the molds for a Japanese dinosaur exhibit in 2001. As part of that agreement, it got a second cast from the company at a discounted rate of about $100,000, company owner Gilles Danis said.
"To restore an animal like this you have to do a lot of research and culling, and that gets very expensive," Danis said. "The museum helped us a lot with that. They only had 30 percent of a skeleton, though. So we had to do some speculation about what the whole body of the animal looked like."
The original mold took more than two years to design, and intricate, realistic detail was added to the fiberglass casts by Matthew Herne, an Australian sculptor, Danis said.
The seismosaurus is part of the Diplodocus family of dinosaurs, which lived in the late Jurassic from about 150 million to 140 million years ago. Researchers filled in the unknown parts of the skeleton using seismosaurus' kin, the diploducus, as a model, Danis said.
"It's kind of like the difference between a coyote and a wolf," said Tim Aydelott, the museum's marketing manager.
"They're built pretty much the same, but one's much bigger. They've used science to extrapolate what the entire seismosaurus would look like."
In the exhibit, the seismosaurus - which means "quake lizard" for its ability to shake the ground - will be accompanied by the replica of another New Mexican dinosaur called a saurophaganax, or "lizard eater," which some scientists have nicknamed Snax. It is the biggest carnivore from the late Jurassic.
"The seismosaurus kind of looks like a really big brontosaurus with a tiny head, and Snax looks kind of like a tyrannosaurus rex with much bigger arms," Aydelott explained.
Snax is set to arrive at the museum in late June or early July. In the exhibit, he will be attacking seismosaurus, while a much smaller stegosaurus runs for its life, Aydelott said.
"Well, the seismosaurus probably wouldn't be in much danger," Lucas said. "Much like a lion would look at an elephant and then move on, so predators would do to this animal. It's simply too big to attack."
How it maintained its life-saving size and why it evolved that way are just a few of the mysteries of seismosaurus that fascinate paleontologists, Lucas said.
"This thing just ate continuously," he said. "It had to just browse all day long to get to that weight. They probably just stood around and ate plants all day and had a good time. It was a very serene lifetime."
Size wasn't the only protection for the peaceful plant eater. It also had a whiplike 62-foot-long tail some speculate could snap so fast it broke the sound barrier, Danis said.
"The important thing probably wasn't that it could break the sound barrier," Lucas said. "It was that it could snap so hard it could break the back of a big meat-eating dinosaur."
The late Jurassic is known as the golden age of dinosaurs. Never before or since have land animals attained the huge sizes they did at that time - and nobody knows why, Lucas said.
"I don't think people are really working on this problem right now," Lucas said. "We're sort of in the early age of discovery with these animals. I like to think some kid will come through here and see this exhibit, and one day that kid will grow up to be the paleontologist who figures that out."
It's the mystery that draws kids, parents, scientists and people from all walks of life to be fascinated with these creatures, he added.
"They're such huge, strange, almost implausible animals," Lucas said. "When you look at this gigantic creature - with this tiny head - it's hard to believe it really existed. But it did."
***
THE SEISMOSAURUS FILE
Length: 110 feet.
Height: 18 feet.
Weight: 30 tons.
Diet: Immense amounts of plants.
Lifestyle: Probably lived in herds.
Life span: About 100 years.
Period: It lived during the late Jurassic, from 156 million to 145 million years ago.
Protection: Fast, powerful tail and sheer size.
Intelligence: Its tiny brain compared with its large body size ranks it the least intelligent of all dinosaurs.
Source: Enchanted Learning educational Web site, www.enchantedlearning.com.
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