KOLLER TRX-293 TRINITY 18 April 2023

‘First you have to stabilise every bone – after 65 million years they need some treatment. This involves a lot of glue, as the bones are extracted from a large rock, which we call the matrix. You can imagine taking something broken out of a package – as soon as the rock around it is re- moved it falls apart, so you have to stabilize it im- mediately after removing a bit of thematrix. This process starts at the dig site and ends in the lab, where you finally dip each bone in an acrylic bath, which takes care of non-visible cracks. Looking at the restauration quality of TRX 293-TRINITY, I must say that it is exquisite’. Nils Kötschke likens a high-quality dinosaur skeleton like TRINITY to the Mona Lisa: ‘I am al- ways attentive to the preparation methods and how the preparation is done. For these three specimens, the preparation was executed very well, sowe have very nice bone surfaces. I always describe it as being like the imprint structure of a fingerprint. When you see all the fine bone struc- tures still preserved, somebody did a very good job. And the specimen is very well preserved. So herewe have all the fine bone details and all three specimens as well. What particularly surprised me is that we have not only the vertebrae, the body of the vertebrae, but also the fragile, deli- cate spines of the dorsal of the back vertebrae and the cervical neck vertebrae are present as well. The very fine skull bones from the inside of the skull are not commonly preserved because they are sometimes paper-thin, and these are preserved as well in TRINITY’. ONTHEDEBATE: SCIENCE VS. PRIVATECOLLECTORS Dr Dennis Hansen, Project Leader, Natural HistoryMuseum, University of Zurich ‘For wealthy peoplewho don’t knowhow to dig for dinosaurs, but who are still really interested in dinosaurs andwant to buy them, I see it the same way as art collecting. ‘Art historians would also like every single important painting to be in the public realm. But experience has shown us that sooner or later that happens anyway. There are enough dinosaurs out there for everyone. ‘Basically, there are just not enough people digging for them at the moment. And any dino- saur that is unearthed in the US, at least on pri- vate land, is fair game for sale. If it’s bought by a private collector, sooner or later, experience shows time and time again that it ends up in a public museum anyway. Many of today’s large public museums in major cities were started by- private collectors, or their collections were built up around private collections. You need to have both private andmuseumcollectors, because it’s a little bit of a symbiosis, and simply seeing it as black and white is really not productive to my mind. ‘And dinosaurs are not dug up from deep be- low the surface. When you find a dinosaur, it’s be- cause it’s already eroding away. If no one comes along todig it out within twoor three generations, it will completely disappear anyway. So if we have towait two or three generations for a private col- lector or their grandchildren to donate it to amu- seum, that’s fine. I mean, the dinosaur is already 65, 66million years old. What’s a few human gen- erations between friends?’ 13