Ready? One, two, three, move.

 

It has to be 400 pounds at least, right, if no more.

 

Go slowly.

 

The team began the precarious task of shifting a femur, the single heaviest bone in the dinosaur’s body. 

 

Try to keep in a line, because if we go on the side, it’s just gonna be really difficult. That one should go that way. 

 

Because the fossil is so delicate, it’s been cased in plaster and reinforced with steel bars.

 

When you’re handling bones that are heavy and fragile, that is definitely not an easy process. If, you know, you don’t have the right people, the bones can break. 

 

It will take many more months of work to excavate the entire skeleton and get it back to LA for analysis. 

 

Good, good.

 

But to build an exhibition, you don’t have to spend months in the desert digging out bones. There are other places to find fossils. 

 

There are plenty of paleontologists working out in the field and excavating new fossils, naming new species every year, but there are also scientists here combing through existing collections in dusty storerooms, hoping to make new discoveries from bones that were found decades if not centuries ago. 

 

I’ve come to the natural history museum in Oxford, and I’m here to meet Darren Nash. He’s a paleontologist who looks for new dinosaurs in the backrooms of museums. There are always a huge number of specimens behind the scenes, either because they’re incomplete, unglamorous, or unidentified.