Fukui Dinosaur Museum: Getting the Dinosaurs Back on Their Feet

Into the egg

Beyond it, a giant silver egg rose against the hills of Katsuyama. The museum’s exterior takes its shape from a dinosaur egg, enlarged sufficiently to accommodate the adults. Inside, white balconies circled a deep central space.

The trail before the skeleton

Before the large skeletons came a much smaller animal, and a record of where it had been. Across a pale slab of stone ran the marks left by a horseshoe crab. Follow them and there it was, at the end of its own trail. The label called the exhibit “Final trail of a horseshoe crab”; the Japanese title was more theatrical: “Dance of Death.”

The animal belonged to the Jurassic. That puts a considerable distance between its walk and ours, yet the tracks made the encounter unusually specific. This was not just the shape of an ancient creature. It had moved across this surface, leaving one mark after another, and then stopped.

Both the traveller and the journey had survived.

Getting a fifteen-metre animal standing

A little farther on, the problem of putting an extinct animal on display became much larger. A Camarasaurus lay stretched and curved across a broad slab, its bones labelled by body part. This was a replica showing the skeleton as it had been found in Wyoming. It was recognisably a dinosaur, but it was a long way from the upright animal usually presented in museum halls.

Before anything could loom

The Camarasaurus had come from Wyoming, but other discoveries began much closer to the museum. Excavations at Kitadani, here in Katsuyama, started in 1989 and yielded fossils of dinosaurs that were new to science. Fukuiraptor, Fukuisaurus and Fukuititan are among the animals identified from those finds. Their names carry a little of the local geography with them, even when their skeletons are displayed far from the rocks where they were found.

An excavation reconstruction brought the work back down to ground level. A helmeted figure stood among broken rock with a measuring staff; a hammer and tape lay nearby. After the carefully lit skeletons, it was a useful change of scene. Before anything could loom over a visitor, someone had to recognise it in the ground and get it out.

The small ones still demand attention

Back among the skeletons, the large outlines began to give way to smaller peculiarities. A row of tall plates ran down one back. Another animal carried an elaborate covering of armour, its individual pieces held above the ribs by thin supports. The mounts made it possible to see both the outside of the animal and the space beneath it—layers that a living body would have kept inconveniently covered.