Colossal Fossil

Beginning on Saturday, February 27, the Louisiana Art & Science Museum will open its newest display to the public: a sixty-five-million year old, authentic and intact fossilized Triceratops skull. On a long-term, two-year loan from Raising Cane’s and the Graves family, the three-horned skull measures eighty-six inches long and weighs over two thousand pounds—a fossil of this stature with such little distortion is an undeniable rarity.

Montana rancher Jason Phipps stumbled across the skull in the late summer of 2011 while driving cattle in the Hell Creek Formation area, a common hot spot for finding the dinosaurs' remains. After Phipps and his brother, Clayton, spent days slowly excavating the fossil, paleontologist (and Co-Consulting Director of the Natural History Department at Bonhams auction house in Los Angeles) Thomas Lindgren aided in its authentication, preparation, and transport to Baton Rouge.

A nail-biting installation took place at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum February 24.

According to Lindgren, the country has entered a period he dubs the “Dinosaur Rush”—an event not unlike the nineteenth-century Gold Rush of the American west—in which the value of dinosaur specimens, paired with public intrigue, has resulted in a significant boom in the demand for fossils. The United States is the only country in the world, said Lindgren, in which the government doesn’t have automatic rights to dinosaur fossils; so any discoveries are automatically the property of the landowner. Because of this system of private ownership and the amounts of money involved, dinosaur fossil hunting is on the rise. The Triceratops skull now installed at LASM is one of the most complete ever found, representing an extraordinarily unique opportunity for LASM. As it is customary for fossils to be named after their discoverers, the skull will be called “Jason.”

Raising Cane’s founder Todd Graves, an avid collector of historical artifacts, came to acquire the fossil through his friendship with Lindgren. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to bring it home to Baton Rouge,” Graves said. “No other Louisiana museum has an authentic dinosaur on this scale in their collections, so we hope this will be one more reason to visit downtown Baton Rouge and LASM.”

After a nail-biting, yet successful, transport to the museum, Lindgren expects Jason will certainly spark interest within the community’s youth. “This isn’t something you see in a book or on television,” Lindgren said. “It’s a real entity, and it opens up a connection to the past. It provides a moment of exhilaration and amazement that, as I experienced as a child, can develop into a career in exploration.”

LASM curator Elizabeth Weinstein agrees wholeheartedly. “What child hasn’t imagined finding such a treasure?” she laughed. “We may have some expert paleontologists in the future from Baton Rouge!” A primary goal of the museum in displaying the Triceratops skull will be to provide viewers with a greater context of the shared past between humans and dinosaurs. “In addition to beauty and interest,” Weinstein said, “we can learn more about the fossil and place it within our own history.”

The museum plans to add a multitude of dinosaur-related programs and activities to its offerings, and the creation of specific tours for school groups will cover topics such as the formation of the Earth, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and various fields of exploration such as archaeology, geology, and paleontology. In its new home at LASM, Jason stands as a stark reminder of the mystery and enormity of what roamed the planet in those days of flesh and teeth, and, additionally, aids in a more detailed understanding of the long and complex timeline that constitutes human existence.