A titanic dinosaur that roamed North Dakota
tens of millions of years ago has a new home
– in South Carolina.
The fossil remains of a Triceratops, one of
the last great dinosaurs of the Cretaceous
period, are on display at the Bob Campbell
Geology Museum on the campus of Clemson University.
There’s never been not even a toenail of
Triceratops anywhere in Clemson, so now we
have three plaster field jackets full of triceratops
material – something like nearly a thousand
pounds of triceratops fossil, if you account
for the plaster and the rock it’s encased
in.
So it was kind of a big deal.
Our new preparation lab features windows and
a set of steps so that our smaller visitors
can step up and look through the windows and
actually see the fossils being prepared from
the rock.
It’s a very slow, painstaking process.
We have to go very slowly so that we don’t
damage the specimens.
And we’re trying to preserve all this data
for future generations of scientists.
The Bob Campbell Geology Museum is a unique
resource in the Upstate.
There’s nowhere else.
You have to go all the way to Columbia, South
Carolina, to the state museum on geology and
paleontology or you have to go all the way
to Raleigh, North Carolina, to the state museum
there to see a full-scale natural history
museum.
We also have very ambitious plans to add lots
of new displays.
The fossil preparation lab is a workspace
for myself but it’s also an exhibit.
We have plans to add Pteranodon or Pterodactyl
models that hang from the ceiling – one
that’s skeletonized and one that’s a life
reconstruction.
There’s talk of adding models of scale trees,
these trees that were quite common around
250 million years ago.
Models of these trees that would stretch from
floor to ceiling.
So that we can use some of the upper space
in the gallery that currently isn’t being
used for much other than the lighting.
We have plans to add a 12-foot-tall, 8-foot-wide
Megalodon shark jaw, so the giant 60-foot-long
great white shark ancestor that lived off
the coast of South Carolina.
We have plans to add a reconstruction of one
of those as essentially the new entranceway
into the gallery.
Something that will hopefully excite the minds
of young and old alike and make people want
to learn more about the natural history of
South Carolina.
