Our Dinosaur Librarian
Meet Maureen Walsh, Collections Manager of the Dinosaur Institute, who protects and presides over the Museum’s world-class collection of paleontological thousands of specimens spanning the millions of years dinosaurs stomped, darted, and soared around our prehistoric planet
Maureen Walsh, the Collections Manager of the Dinosaur Institute, is very protective of her dinosaurs. For thirteen years, the paleontologist has protected and presided over the Museum’s world-class collection of paleontological prizes, both tiny and monumental.
The DI’s collection boasts more than 5,000 specimens and encompasses a hard-to-fathom period of time—the 185 million years that dinosaurs lived on Earth. Inside the collection room’s cabinets lay fossils, big and small, from the Triassic (beginning 252 million years ago) to the Cretaceous (ending 66 million years ago). The ancient bones, each tagged with a location and time period, include those from the mightiest of giants—T. Rex, Stegosaurus, and others such as long-necked dinosaurs, which grew to be 80 feet long. In other drawers, there are four-limbed animals, including winged reptiles such as pterosaurs, as well as turtles, crocodiles, birds, mammals, lizards, and snakes that were dinosaur contemporaries.
It’s hard, she says, to pick a favorite.
“As I work through the collection, I discover enigmas of every size and shape,” says Walsh in her office surrounded by trays of fossils to be catalogued, plastic models of pint-sized dinos, and illustrations of ancient scaly and feathered creatures. She says one of the biggest specimens in the collection is a recently excavated Jurassic prize: a 600-pound femur from a long-necked dinosaur that Museum crew unearthed from the Gnatalie quarry in Utah, which is now on display. Among the smallest fossils, she thinks, is the fang of Diablophis gilmorei, a Late Jurassic snake, that feasted on frogs, small mammals, and insects.
FROM FIELD TO DRAWER
Meticulous management of the collection at NHM is only part of Walsh’s job, though. She oversees the field work permitting process on BLM land, and is currently focused on specimen digitization.
Beyond managing the collection, she prepares specimens for study. Her particular expertise is
Mesozoic birds. For over a decade, she has traveled mostly to China, Brazil and Europe, to prepare the delicate bones of 70-125-million-year-old birds, each with its own personality and attitude.
She loves to venture back in time through the microscope and meet up with her feathered friends. Her work helps Dinosaur Institute Curator and Senior Vice-President of Research and Collections Dr. Luis Chiappe shed light on dinosaur evolution.
“Maureen’s skillful conservation work on this ancient avian menagerie has revealed a wealth of detailed information that otherwise would have remained undetected,” says Chiappe. “Chip by chip, she has given shape to many of the building blocks that support our understanding of how early birds became the birds of today.”
Proyecto Dinosaurios is supported by The Ahmanson Foundation.
