Digging through ROM history for clues about how these behemoth skeletons made a move.

In December 2005, for the first time ever, two dinosaurs were installed on the ROM's main floor, giving them new prominence for visitors entering the building. With the opening of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal, Prosaurolophus and Edmontosaurus are visible from the new Bloor Street entrance--a fitting drawing card for a museum famous for its hadrosaur collection. While the placement of these dinosaurs within the building is new, their presence at the ROM is not. Visitors may remember them from the much-loved Alberta Badlands exhibit in the old dinosaur gallery that closed in January 2005.

As coordinating curator for the new James and Louise Temerty Galleries of the Age of Dinosaurs, scheduled to open December 15, I have been concerned not only with what specimens will be displayed in the gallery, but also how these large skeletons might be moved to their destination. Very early in the gallery's design, the planning team decided to increase the diversity of dinosaurs on display. But with new ones being added, we could not use all the existing mounts from the old gallery. Reluctant to dismantle them, we were left wondering where they could go if not in the new gallery. Fortunately two of our biggest mounts were assigned space on the main floor--Prosaurolophus in Samuel HallCurrelly Gallery and Edmontosaurus just beyond in Canada Court. The snag, we realized, was how to get them there.

This was not the first move for these dinosaurs. Both had changed locations in 1972, although for that move they did not have to go through any doors or up or down stairs. But Prosaurolophus, one of the ROM's first dinosaurs, had been installed on the third floor of the original 1914 building before it and several other dinosaur skeletons were moved down to the second floor of the new building in 1932. This would have been an enormous undertaking. Wondering how on earth it was done, I undertook a fun but ultimately unfruitful search through various archives for any mention of the move.

My search began in the ROM's own archives, checking annual reports by ROM paleontologists W. A. Parks and L. S. Russell. The first mention of dinosaurs came in a booklet about the new Museum's paleontology galleries written by Parks for delegates to the International Geological Congress that visited the ROM in 1913. Parks noted that empty space in the galleries was reserved for erecting large vertebrate skeletons. At that time the Museum had very few vertebrate fossils, including some fish and turtles from Alberta.

In 1918, Parks began making regular collecting excursions to Alberta. That first year he collected a hadrosaur, Gryposaurus, the ROM's first dinosaur. In a note in the University of Toronto Monthly in June 1920, Parks is quoted as saying that the animal would have been about 17 feet (5.25 metres) tall while "in its natural posture." The mount was assembled in the gallery. Technicians mounted blocks of sandstone containing the partially exposed bones in a large wooden frame. The resulting large and extremely heavy plaque was raised for mounting on the wall using a scaffold and pulley.

Parks's ensuing annual reports chronicle the addition of more dinosaurs, including Parasaurolophus in 1920, Prosaurolophus in 1921, and a partial skeleton of Albertosaurus in 1923. Numerous mammal skeletons from the more recent Cenozoic Era were also added to the gallery.

In a February 1923 report Parks noted: During the past six years ... five splendid skeletons, some of them new to science, have been mounted, and a larger number are housed in the basement awaiting the work of the preparators. Unless greater gallery space is made available in the near future, these remarkable objects must remain inaccessible to the public.

By September 1928 the Museum was planning a major expansion. Parks recommended a complete rearrangement of the ROM with the dinosaurs on the second floor, although he acknowledged that they might prove too large to be moved. We know that somehow he did manage to have them moved, but I was still searching for clues as to how this was done.

While helping me search the ROM's archives, librarian Arthur Smith came across some paperwork, muttering, "Oh, you're probably not interested in these letters." But indeed I was! The papers were copies of correspondence between Piggott Construction, Chapman and Oxley Architects, and University of Toronto superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, A. D. LePan. At last, a mention of dinosaurs. The letters indicated the new gallery space would be ready to receive dinosaurs in December 1931.

A search of the Piggot Archive at McMaster University and the Chapman and Oxley Archives in the Provincial Archives of Ontario revealed no clues about the move, nor did the Toronto newspapers. But while I was searching at U of T--in vain yet again--for clues in the daily journals of LePan, archivist Harold Averill suggested I check Dean Maxwell's journals.

As assistant superintendent of Buildings and Grounds, Maxwell appears to have been the university's man on the ground during most of the Museum expansion. Among his notes, I found the following tantalizing clue:

Tuesday Dec. 29 1931--Took Clarke and Roberts on temporarily under D'Arcy to guard Museum at partition between old and new buildings while moving of dinosaurs takes place. (These fortunate individuals were paid the princely sum of $25 a week to work from 7:30 am to 7:30 pm, seven days a week). The trail was getting warmer. And, finally, the jackpot, such as it was:

Thursday Jan 26 1932--Dominion Bridge bringing down the largest of the dinosaurs.

Dominion Bridge was the steel company involved in building the Museum's first addition. Unfortunately, though, I could find no further information about how the dinosaurs were "brought down." We do know that the huge wall mounts, weighing several tonnes each, were apparently moved intact down two flights of stairs: there is no sign that their original massive wooden frames had been altered. We ourselves had to cut down these same frames to get the dinosaurs out of the gallery years later. I wondered if the mounts might have been hoisted by crane and put through an unfinished window, but asking people who may have heard stories of the move turned up no leads.

Coincidentally, J. Morrow Oxley of Chapman and Oxley Architects, the firm behind the Museum expansion, was my grandfather. My father, Loren Oxley, also an architect, was keenly interested in the Museum and occasionally accompanied his father on site visits during the construction. He would have been 14 years old when the dinosaurs were moved and must have been aware of the details. Unfortunately he is no longer available to tell us. While he was alive, I never dreamt I'd be involved in the moving of the dinosaurs. As a curator of invertebrate paleontology, I had no involvement with backboned creatures and never foresaw my involvement in the dinosaur gallery. My father left behind only a frustratingly incomplete account in his 1983 Rotunda article: "The dinosaurs ... were successfully moved to the second floor of the new wing, intact and undamaged."

Parks, too, reveals little in his annual report for November 1931/1932, dismissing the whole move as an inconvenience, and briefly mentioning that "a large open mount of Corythosaurus was erected." This hadrosaur skeleton, which stood at the entrance to the new dinosaur hall, actually determined, in part, the building's design. Parks had worked with the architect to ensure that the second floor of the Museum's new wing had extra-high ceilings to accommodate the expected 17-foot (5.25-metre) height of this dinosaur--the height he had earlier predicted for a natural pose of Gryposaurus.

As the ROM was still a department of the University of Toronto at that time, university building staff took on most of the heavy installation work. When Edmontosaurus was taken off the wall in 2005, we found a signature on the back: "H. F. Tulloch, Nov. 1934." ROM technicians came across a similar signature on the back of the mammal fossil bone bed "Made by H. F. Tulloch, U of T Carp Shop, Jan 1929."

By the time the next major changes were made to the dinosaur gallery, the story became easier to follow. A major renovation begun in 1967 occurred within memory of people still working at the ROM. Beginning in 1971, all the ROM's dinosaurs were relocated within the second-floor dinosaur gallery. The floor was cleared of cases and ROM technicians and preparators lowered the large plaque mounts onto their backs, dragged them into their new positions using pulleys attached to the floor, then raised them up against the wall with pulleys and metal scaffolding. The tall, free-mounted Corythosaurus was jacked onto rollers and dragged into position.

Carpenters, technicians, and artists built the new gallery around the specimens, creating fake rock strata for the Alberta Badlands exhibit and Jurassic and Cretaceous landscapes for the habitat exhibits. A new mount of the hadrosaur Lambeosaurus was created, in a walking pose with its feet in a recently collected cast of fossil footprints.

Some of the specimens from the old gallery were disassembled and placed in storage. The presentation style of the day focused on dioramas, so fewer dinosaurs could be displayed in the new gallery, which opened March 11, 1974. But a few of these specimens will once again be on display in the new Temerty Dinosaur Galleries.

This brings us to Renaissance ROM, the Museum's current expansion project, when I came into the story. All the specimens in the 1974 gallery had to be removed and either placed in storage or conserved for display, in preparation for being re-mounted in the new galleries on the second floor of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. Since I had found so few clues in the archives, the gallery team would have to innovate.

Logistically, the free mounts were simple to move: they had to be cut apart, resulting in easy-to-move pieces. Albertosaurus was the first to go and technicians and volunteers painstakingly conserved the bones before sending them to Research Casting International (RCI) for re-mounting into a more scientifically accurate pose. In sharp contrast to the old mounting method in which the bones were drilled, fitted with metal rods, and welded together, the new 3-D skeleton mounts have a modular framework so that individually mounted bones can be readily removed. In all, nine of our free-mount dinosaur skeletons are undergoing full or partial re-mounting by RCI.

But the four wall-mounted hadrosaurs posed a challenge. Moving them would be like moving ponderous chunks of rock. RCI undertook the task of preparing and moving the mounts. First they shifted the Badlands exhibit to make room for new second-floor washrooms and an emergency exit. They protected the dinosaurs with plywood boxes while construction crews demolished the gallery around them.

The two hadrosaurs destined for the first floor had to be moved downstairs via the freight elevator. This entailed getting them into the narrow second-floor Rotunda mezzanine and around several tight right-angle bends. If you've ever moved a king-sized mattress into a tiny apartment you'll have some idea of what we were up against.

In addition, the frames were too tall to fit into the elevator as they were. Cutting off the tops of their massive wooden back panels--right down to the edge of the bones--then jacking the remaining frame onto casters, gave us precisely one inch to spare. Prosaurolophus was short enough to get around all the corners. But Edmontosaurus, at more than 25 feet (7.7 metres) in length, was too long to be moved intact. Its tail had to be removed and the frame cut right to the back of the back legs before it could be rolled to the freight elevator. I was holding my breath the whole way.

Once on the first floor, RCI again jacked up the two hadrosaurs and mounted them against the wall in their current positions, then built up their backgrounds and added new frames. We took advantage of the fact that Edmontosaurus's tail had to be removed, having it re-positioned when the sections were put back--its tail is now raised almost in line with its back instead of drooping on the ground, much closer to its natural pose. The two remaining wall mounts, Parasaurolophus and Gryposaurus, were moved into the Lee-Chin Crystal in May and placed in their final positions in the new gallery. They went in easily through an existing tall window opening that is now a fire door linking the Hilary and Galen Weston wing to the Lee-Chin Crystal.

As ROM staff had in the past, we managed to successfully move these huge skeletons to their new home. (And future curators will now know how we did it!) When the galleries open in December, the dinosaurs will once again take their place, some in their fourth location, to thrill new generations of Museum visitors young and old.