Jake Lee, a fossil-restoration technician and 'dinosaur docent,' moves a replica skull from the Victoria Dino Lab's Tyrannosaurus rex, the second most complete skeleton of the species ever found.Photography by James MacDonald/The Globe and Mail/The Globe and Mail
Tusks, skulls, gemstone-infused cephalopods and dinosaur fossils. Lots and lots of fossils. They are everywhere as you walk through Dino Lab. Some fossils are just the size of teeth or simply fragments of bone. Others are full-sized femurs stretching over a metre in length. Some are still encased in layers of tinfoil, gleaming white plaster and millions of years of rock and sediment that are slowly and painstakingly being carved, chipped and scraped away to reveal some of the planet’s earliest and greatest inhabitants.
Tucked into a non-descript corner of Victoria is Dino Lab, one of the premier fossil wholesalers and fossil prep labs in North America. Bringing fossils and bones to life is no easy task, requiring months of bone prep, reconstruction, fabrication and assembly to create museum-quality displays. Founded by Terry Ciotka and Carly Burbank in 2004, it has taken on some large and scientifically significant projects in the past 15 or so years. To name just a few: Victoria has the world’s second-most complete Tyrannosaurus rex, which is on a world tour; the Zephyrosaurus, the only mounted specimen in existence, is on display in Copenhagen’s museum of natural history; its Dracrorex hogwartsia (who’s name is inspired by Harry Potter) is one of only two in existence and is in the special collections in the Royal Ontario Museum. Finally, there’s the Melbourne Triceratops, which is the Dino Lab’s latest project.
Three huge fossil pallets are still only partly exposed on Dino Lab’s display floor, one with a Triceratops skull and teeth smiling back at you – prehistoric animals waiting to find new life.
At top, Mr. Lee works to remove sediment and protective plaster from a Triceratops fossil, one of the lab's latest projects. The plaster has recorded an imprint of the animal's scaled hide, bottom left; slowly, its skull is uncovered, bottom right.
This Struthiomimus skull is part of a complete skeleton display. This species, whose name means 'ostrich mimic' for its bird-like appearance, lived in North America in the late Cretaceous period (about 99 to 65 million years ago) and stood just under four metres tall.
Mr. Lee gestures toward the skull of an Allosaurus, a predator that was at the top of the late Jurassic food chain. These creatures could grow up to 10 metres long and could open their mouths at slightly more than a 90-degree angle to take big bites out of their prey, a 2015 study estimated.
While some of the creatures the Dino Lab reconstructs are huge compared with humans, much can depend on small bones like the one under the magnifying light at top. Some bones need to be repaired, like the one at bottom right. Then they need to be put together on a mounting system, like the one supporting the Spinosaurus claw at bottom right.
The T-rex skull at the lab is only a replica: The real one is touring museums around the world.
Our Morning Update and Evening Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.