A 150 million-year-old puzzle named Alice arrived in Cleveland last Thursday. With 248 pieces and hundreds of steel connecting brackets, Alice is an allosaurus, a terrifying predator from the Jurassic period.
The skeleton rose on a steel frame at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History Thursday night. For more than four hours, ten people labored to build Alice, who stands more than 7 feet tall and is 28 feet long from tail to jaw.
According to Joe Hannibal, a paleontologist at the natural history museum, the dinosaur was found in the 1960s in a mass grave of 44 disjointed allosaurs at the Cleveland-Lloyd Quarry in Cleveland.
In 1968, her pieces arrived here and were put in storage while researchers worked on rebuilding her. By 1983, the fossilized bones were assembled and put on display with her tail touching the ground. Researchers later determined that that was not an accurate standing position.
Alice was dismantled and sent to a Canadian company that makes casts and reconstructs and replicated dinosaurs and other museum displays in 2008. She was cleaned, and her worn pieces removed and replaced.
Garth Dullman, project manager of Research Casting International in Trenton, Ontario said that Cleveland’s Alice is made up of 50 percent fossilized bone and bones molded in polyurethane, polyester resin and gypsum plaster.
The 1,500-pound predator will now be mounted correctly on her steel framework, with her tail off the ground and her hips as the tallest point on the body.
She will be unveiled at a “Welcome Back Alice” event on Saturday, November 19. Kids can participate in an allosaurus roaring contest, Alice Bingo and other events.
