‘Very, very old’
Reassembling Trinity was no easy feat, Ms Yolanda Schicker-Siber, a curator of Switzerland’s Aathal Dinosaur Museum, told AFP as she secured another toe bone.
“The bones are very, very old. So they are brittle, they have cracks,” she said.
“They are stabilised, but you never know if there is a crack that you haven’t seen so far… You have to have the glue ready.”
Mr Aart Walen, a Dutch expert with 30 years’ experience assembling dinosaur skeletons, agreed.
“We didn’t break anything yet,” he said proudly, as he and his colleagues worked on two large ischium bones, which sat near the dinosaur’s pelvic area.
With a parakeet named Ethel perched on his shoulder, Walen filled in cracks using what looked like dental tools and modelling compound.
It was important for the fixes to remain visible, he said, showing the dark lines where the fissures had been.
“You have to see where it has been repaired. There are some stories about fakes out there. We don’t want that,” he said, referring to the aborted Christie’s auction.
Knocking on different parts of the bone, he also demonstrated the different sounds made by original bone and the plastic additions used to fill out the skeleton.
Room for a T-Rex
Mr Link said personally he would like to see a Swiss museum buy the skeleton, adding “it would be nice to have it here permanently”.
Ms Schicker-Siber said the dinosaur museum she runs with her father outside Zurich unfortunately could not afford to acquire Trinity.
“But if somebody buys it and doesn’t know where to put it, we have a museum (with room) for a T-Rex,” she said. AFP
