DRILLING OUT DINOSAURS.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19368, 27 July 1925, Page 5

DRILLING OUT DINOSAURS.

DARK-AGE MONSTERS COME TO LIGHT In Ihe basement of the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, are 23 bc-.et which for mystery Mid romance n.ake Joanna Soulhcott’s boxes look like a joke. Nobody in Britain knows what is in them yet. Only one mail in the world knows what is in them, and he is out in Tanganyika, and has probably forgotten, for he is busy packing other I boxes las quickly as he can. I The museum authorities have a rough [idea, of course, for the boxes contain ■parts of dinosaurs, the Strange, almost {brainless, monsters which’ lived in the world when the earth was complaraI lively young. I FROM THE DARK AGES [ I was present (writes a Daily News I representative) when an unemotional (British, w’orkman opened some of the .cases, and revealed brown-paper-and-isacking parcels packed in straw! /They {looked commonplace enough, but it was inot commonplace to realise thtit one of these parcels contained a fragment of 'a rib of a beast whose career came to end somewhere about millions of 'years ago. i Air \\. E. Swinton, of the geology [department, told mo that dinosaurs were his pets. “We hope that from the pieces sent home by the expedition jwe may be able to rcconstryct a comIplete anim'al,” he said. “We don’t I know' yet what treasures there may be in these cases, and there are many .others on the way. Unfortunately all {this work which is of the first importance needs money and we haven’t got very much.” j In another underground room i saw [the “ prepara tor ’’ at work. He is a surgeon in stone. He works with an !instrument like a dentist’s drill. When the bones come to him they are cm i bedded in stone which is called the matrix. With the needle point of his 'dentist’s drill he hfid to chip away, fragment by fragment, all the stone iwhich hides the buried treasure of bone. ■ One of his jobs is nearing completion. [Embedded in a mass of stone, the iml pression of the skin of an armoured dinosaur from America whs found. It is several feet across, and there is only lhe faint discolouration of the skin to |go upon. Yet the point of the patient needle has followed the elusive mark|ings and revchled some of the age-old Isecrcts of the stone. THE WORLD’S BEST I “It will be the finest skin impression |in the world,” said the preparator. He was once upon a time a stonemason and ihe knows all about the cutting of stone. I Down here in the cellars the real jwork of the museum goes on. What Hhe public sees in the rooms upstairs lis merely the result. The reason for [the museum’s existence is behind the (locked doors of the work rooms and 'si udies. ( From those Secret rooms some day Imay comp the complete reconstruction iof the fierce, ungainly creatures who inhabited the planet before the coming iof the mamm'als. Some of them were 30 feet and more in height.