Palaeo-Redo: Royal Ontario Museum
For my birthday (well weekend afterwards) in 2021, me and my mother went to the Royal Ontario Museum, and several times afterwards. I loved all of it, but me being me, I looked most forward to the museum's dinosaur gallery, the James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs. They were good, but I did feel they could be better, and with some of if not a lot of the info and exhibit design outdated to the 2000's, it's due for a renovation.
Now today we're doing something new: Palaeo-Redo, where I reimagine works of palaeo-media, both as I would have done or could be improved.
And without further ado, I present... The Ahmed Family Gallery of Dinosaurs!
The new gallery will be themed around the jaws and teeth of dinosaurs and their diets and evolution. In one direction, if you arrive from the Dawn of Life Gallery, the axis would be the latter and how environmental change impacted them. In the other direction, is the anatomical differences between clades of dinosaurs in jaws and teeth, and how it affected the rest of their anatomies and lifestyles. Given they had some of the more complex jaws and teeth out of the entire clade of dinosaurs, and the museum's own noted collection of them, hadrosaurs and ornithopods as a whole would be heavily featured.
Aesthetically, the gallery would have a habitat immersion theme of murals and dioramas to simulate the environment dinosaurs lived it, specifically the plains of the Morrison Formation and the wetland forests of the Dinosaur Park Formation, kind of like what was done with prior to the 2007 renovation. The asesthetics and interpretives would also be brought more in line with the Willner Madge Dawn of Life gallery.
Going from the main entrance by the museum's main staircase, visitors first see a tree-like display with skulls and teeth of dinosaurs, with theropods and sauropods on one side, and cerapods and thyreophorans on the other, all surrounded by fossil plants. This replaces the previous display on jurassic marine life and most of the specimens there [1]. The display explains the differences between the two major groups of dinosaurs, the Saurischian or lizard-hipped dinosaurs, and the Ornithischian or bird-hipped dinosaurs. The signage emphasises one of the biggest difference between the clades is that the bird-hipped's jaws are complex enough to actually chew food, while theropods' and sauropods' jaws were simpler and could not, merely clipping or ripping before swallowing whole, and this had major ramifications for their biology too.
Meanwhile, out in the main atrium hangs in addition to the Quetzalcoatlus (moved over a bit to facilitate sucg) would hang a marine reptile just to complete a trifecta of "Land" (Futalongkosaurus) and "air" (Quetz). Perhaps an ichthyosaur like Shastasaurus, or a plesiosaur, or a mosasaur like Tylosaurus.
On the left side, at the place where the Ichthyosaurs were, a Euphlocephalus stands around grazing, oblivious to a Dromaeosaurus an (admittedly anachronistic) standing on it as an Anzu wylei passing by. At the other end, a Gorgosaurus sits, holding another dinosaur in its jaws to eat.
Where the theropods once were is the Chasmosaurus (moved over from the other crystal) is going head to head with another ceratopsid, perhaps Arrhinoceratops or Styracosaurus. Several other creatures are present, fleeing. These would include Parksosaurus, Struthiomimus, and some turtles. The obvious link is that they all prominently have beaks, and signage would highlight this too.
The Pteranodon (or is it Geosternbergia?) stretch out at the entrance to the big open part.
Reaching the open side of the gallery in question, visitors now witness the biggest changes of the gallery. On the left side is the Jurassic platform, where Gordo the Barosaurus is now in a more bending position, with his neck and head now crane rightwards to eat at a fairly short tree, perhaps a cycad or fern. As for the other dinosaurs, the Stegosaurus would be updated to be more like what we now know it was actually like thanks to London's Sophie and given equally long legs and neck, same goes for the Toni cast to actually be Brachiosaurus as its now understood [2]. Meanwhile you would also have an interpretive for examining the digestive tracts of sauropods; in the same display would be a real piece of sauropod skin the museum has but has never publically shown to my knowledge [3].
Instead of most of the hadrosaurs being on the outer rim along the wall, you have a D-shaped platform in the center (replacing the case of ankylosaur and pterosaur) holding several hadrosaurs around model trees all feeding, like Murrae the Parasaurolophus, Lambeosaurus, and the Maiasaura (but minus one skeleton and several specimens, which goes into storage). Here would also be displays on the evolution on flowering plants during the Cretaceous period as caused by the shifting of continents creating the Atlantic causing wetter atmospheric conditions, as well as insects and dinosaurs; for the former I'd bring in specimens from the Redmond Formation in Labrador, which holds a lot of insect fossils dating back 94 million years ago.
The fact that Gordo's and Murrae's heads would be at roughly the same height and as before right next to one another allows visitors to compare and contrast the chewing jaws and teeth and digestive system of the chewing hadrosaur versus the simplistic leaf stripping jaws and the digestive system of sauropods, helped by interpretives along the railing, like a video display with a scrolling knob.
On the wall itself, all sorts of videos are projected: the way the earth's plates shifted from the Early Jurassic to the K-Pg extinction, scenes from Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta, the Triassic Wasson Bluffs in Nova Scotia, Jurassic deposits in British Columbia, and various Late Cretaceous locales (like the Frenchman Formation in Saskatchewan for example).
Where the hadrosaurs once were along the back wall, you instead have two sections. One is where the Parasaurolophus is, and is dedicated to the Early Jurassic and the afromentioned Wasson Bluff, where fossil skeletons of species at the area; also here in focus is the Breakup of Pangaea and it's associated extinction. The other would be a section for the Early Cretaceous, including a cast of Borealopelta.
As for the other crystal, with both the Maastrichtian life, T. rex, and cenozoic displays... I don't know yet, I didn't think of them when I was writing this until very late into it. At the moment, I'd emphasise species that survived the K-Pg extinction and Canadian fossil finds there (if that's not the case already), and on the island of it, have the T. rex be posed in a fight with a new mount, the Triceratops Dio [4], the end section on the ramp would have interpretives on our time and extinction of the Anthropocene. But that's for another day, and that's only possible at best as I've got other stuff to do.
Finally, maybe link this to the museum's bird gallery, which connects to the cenozoic gallery via an otherwise-empty corridor. My idea is that here, the anthropogenic extinction would be continued with a display on extinct birds, like the Passenger Pigeon or the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker (assuming the museum has specimens of either of them or can acquire them) and how humans cause extinction. Naturally, interpretives on the bird-dinosaur link would also be added to the gallery iself.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this concept. I might even add a drawing floor plan of this redesign later.
Footnotes and References
- I actually imagine in turn, these specimens, while most remaining in storage, would also go into their own travelling exhibition about Ichthyosaurs (call it something like Ichthyosaurs: Age of Sea Dragons), one that would highlight the museum's collection of them and the research done by museum emeritus Christopher McGowan, much like at the end of Dawn of Life. It would be one of those walk through time exhibits from their origins in the Early Triassic 250 million years ago to dying out in the early Late Cretaceous 92 mya... but that's for another day, as well.
- Carballido, J.L.; Marpmann, J.S.; Schwarz-Wings, D.; Pabst, B. (2012). "New information on a juvenile sauropod specimen from the Morrison Formation and the reassessment of its systematic position" (PDF). Palaeontology. 55 (2): 567–582. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4983.2012.01139.x.
- https://thehalloffossilhalls.wordpress.com/2021/04/18/renovated-out-a-juvenile-barosaurus-at-the-american-museum-of-natural-history/
- Dekel, Jordan (August 2019). ROM’s palaeontology team heads to Montana’s badlands to uncover remains of triceratops named Dio. The Globe and Mail.
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