Discovery Place

I'm sure that a lot of the visitors to this website wonder how we find the money to cover our field trips. With rising gas prices it's not so easy now to jump into the old Suburbinobile and head out across country. So to offset my fossil habit I sometimes take on a small job to add to my retirement check. I have a good background in fossil casting and preparation at a major museum. This experience, and a natural art talent, gives me the opportunity to take on some interesting jobs. I recently finished a project for the Discovery Place in downtown Charlotte,NC. Thirty years ago they purchased six state-of-the-art, full-size, automated dinosaurs. But over the years the mechanicals have gradually broken down until a lone sauropod was the only survivor left to greet the young, future paleontolgists walking trough the front doors. I was contacted to help in the repair and painting of all six once the pnumatic systems were repaired. Some of the outer skins weighed more that three hundred pounds and required special curing materials. The painting part was the most fun! Since there's no modern relatives to get an idea of what they looked like, I had full rein of my imagination in picking out the colors. I'm sure that somewhere a T-rex rolled over in it's grave. But it sure was fun! And now that I have a little more "mad" money in my pocket I'll be out there looking for the real thing.