In the past few months, the Grand Rapids Public Museum has been getting in the mood for paleontology with two new exhibits, Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family, a traveling exhibit that will be hosted by the Grand Rapids Public Museum until April 26, 2026, and the Clapp Family Mastodon, a new exhibit featuring a mastodon found in Kent County.
Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family is a traveling exhibit, meaning that the exhibit is moved from institution to institution as opposed to being stationed at a single museum permanently. In this case, Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family is organized by the Australian Museum, who have hosted exhibits at the Grand Rapids Public Museum such as Sharks, which left the GRPM at the end of August.
The tyrannosaurs were defined by a few key features. According to the educator’s guide for Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family, tyrannosaurs were unique in having their nasal bones be fused, helping their skull withstand their strong bites. To complement this, the tyrannosaur family had unique D-shaped teeth at the front of their mouths. These teeth were somewhat analogous to our incisors, helping scrap and pull meat off of captured prey.
Tyrannosaur legs and hips also had a couple of unique features. At the top of their hips, they had a rib of bone that served as an attachment point for strong leg muscles. Their legs were also noticeably longer legs then other predatory dinosaurs.
When walking into the museum, visitors are greeted by a cast skeleton of Scotty, the most massive Tyrannosaurus rex to have ever been discovered and the largest dinosaur discovered in Canada. Surrounding the skeleton are other Tyrannosaurus rex fossils, helping to illustrate some interesting findings found in the research of this Late Cretaceous predator, such as how younger individuals had longer and leaner legs, suggesting that they may have hunted differently from the adults.
Tyrannosaurs: Meet the Family, as the name suggests, is not merely about the well known Tyrannosaurus Rex, but rather celebrates the Tyrannosaur family as a whole. This is arguably most exemplified by the entrance to the main exhibit on the third floor, where visitors are greeted by Guanlong wucaii. This Late Jurassic is wildly different from the titanic Scotty in the main hall, being a relatively small dinosaur with long arms, a covering of feathers, and a prominent crest on it’s snout.
Alongside this early member of the Tyrannosaurs, many cast skeletons of Tyrannosaur species are present in the exhibition hall, ranging from Dilong paradoxus, a small, Chinese species that was the first Tyrannosaur to be discovered with feathers, to more typical representatives of the group such as Albertosaurus sarcophagus and Daspletosaurus torosus. These exhibits are complemented by a variety of real fossils and interactive stations, such as a grip test that lets visitors compare their strength to a Tyannosaurus rex bite.
The exhibit also explores how dinosaur’s evolved into their only surviving forms; the birds. The exhibit explains how small theropods such as Velociraptor mongoliensis eventually evolved into the birds of modern day. The exhibit even has skeletons of non-avian dinosaurs next to the skeletons of birds such as Dromornis stiatoni and the domestic chicken in order to show visitors the similarities between the two.
When asked about the importance of traveling exhibits, Dr. Cory Redman, GRPM’s science curator, said, “It keeps the museum fresh.” He goes on to elaborate, “It means for most people, every time they come to the museum there’s gonna be something new to see. We are working on a big redesign project and so we’re working on redesigning our core exhibits … we don’t have the staff to redo our core exhibits that frequently.”
Dr. Redman also led the excavation of the star of another GRPM paleontological exhibit that opened recently, the Clapp Family Mastodon. In the midst of a major drainage project, Busscher Construction found some bones and called multiple institutions, including the Grand Rapids Public Museum, in order to see if someone could identify the find. The bones turned out to be the skeleton of a juvenile American mastodon (Mammut americanum), Michigan’s state fossil.
This find was notable for multiple reasons. Firstly, the skeleton that was found was around 70% complete. The preservation and fossilization of paleontological remains for researchers to find remarkably rare. According to Dr. Redman, “For any kind of skeletal remains, usually over 20% is when you get pretty excited.”, putting into perspective how rare of a find the Clapp Family Mastodon is. In spot of the size of the find, the excavation was remarkably quick. Due to an ideal combination of loose soil, a shallow depth, well preserved, stable bones and significant amounts of man power, the find was removed within the span of a single day.
The exhibit also explains how researchers examined the site for evidence of the environment where the mastodon lived. One way that researchers did this was by studying the remains of pollen found in the same sediment as the Mastodon skeleton. This was done to figure out what plants would have been found at around the site. It was found that the region the skeleton was found in was primarily composed of forests made of oak and spruce trees and wetlands. This would make the environment of West Michigan during the last “ice age” (technically speaking, we are currently within an ice age that first began 2.58 million years ago. The last “ice age” is, instead, the last glacial maximum, referring to a period where ice sheets significantly advance across the land) much like modern day Northern Michigan.
The exhibit goes into farther detail regarding the environment the mastodon was found in. On one placard, visitors can find a beautifully illustrated scene by Paul Kuchniki, a student at the local community college, that demonstrates the type of scene one could find 13,000 years ago, complete with other species that have been found in Michigan fossil excavations, such as woodland muskox and Scott’s moose, both also now extinct. The placard also explains that the Clapp Family Mastodon would have also lived alongside animals that can still be found today, such as muskrat and painted turtles.
It should be noted that, while the exhibit features some actual fossils from the Clapp Family Mastodon can be found in the exhibit, such as a jawbone and a vertebrae, the full articulated skeleton that visitors can see when walking into the museum is actually a model of the actual skeleton. According to Dr. Redman, this is extremely common practice by museums, in part due to the fact that fossils are often heavy, fragile and valuable.
The bones themselves have had to be treated in order to be preserved. Unlike the Tyrannosaurs currently being housed, which went extinct at minimum tens of millions of years ago, the Clapp Family Mastodon has only been dead for about 13,210 years. This means that the skeleton has not had enough time to completely fossilize, making it more similar to bone then the stone casts that the non-avian dinosaurs are remembered through. Part of this preservation process is ensuring that the bones are dried out thoroughly and evenly.
When describing the process of ensuring this, Dr. Redman explained, “To control that drying, you put one bone in a big plastic bag, you seal it and then just leave a small opening, so you get some air flow and then you use gravity to pull any water that’s in the bone by rotating it and then you just kind of let it sit.”
For the Clapp Family Mastodon, the GRPM worked with Research Casting International to produce 3D scans of the bones and produce a 3D printed copy for exhibition. In order to fill in the gaps left from the missing piece of the skeleton, the museum and Research Casting International used models from the similarly sized Hillsborough Mastodon from New Brunswick, Canada. Attentive visitors can actually see which bones are original from the Clapp Family Mastodon and which were substituted since the two were printed in different colors, with the Clapp Family bones being a dark color while the Hillsborough bones are printed in a lighter, off white color.
The Clapp Family Mastodon is not the only mastodon found within the GRPM collection. During the interview, Dr. Redman showed off the bones of two other mastodons in the museum archive, Smitty and the Moorland Mastodon. Smitty the mastodon, which was only about 20% complete, is a part of the F is for Fossils exhibit found within the entrance hall of the museum while the Moorland Mastodon is the oldest of the museums mastodon specimens, having been discovered in 1904 and put on display at a similar time. Unlike the Clapp Family Mastadon or Smitty, the museum is unsure of exactly how complete the Moorland Mastodon. Dr. Redman has actually been working on determining which bones are original to the Moorland Mastodon and which are wood, plastor, a substitutes from a different find in Florida.
If you are interested in viewing the fossils that the Grand Rapids Public Museum has in it’s archives, the institution’s collection can be found online at https://www.grpmcollections.org/.
…
Thank you for reading to the end! I would like to extend a special thanks to Dr. Cory Redman for meeting with me and letting me have a look in the museum archives. If you would like to read The Rapidian’s version of the article, you can find it here.
Leave a Reply