Thanks to new discoveries, dinosaurs at Milwaukee Public Museum get feathers

First, you hear the deep roar, the thunder and the heavy footsteps.

Then, the flashes of lightning.

And as you turn the corner, a Tyrannosaurus rex stands defiantly over her fresh meal — a triceratops, to be specific — shielding it from a pack of small Velociraptor-like intruders.

When this diorama opened at the Milwaukee Public Museum in 1983, it was the largest installation in North America and the first to display life-sized dinosaurs in their natural habitat.

Just one problem: All those years, it's been wrong.

Well, sort of.

For decades, the intruders, called dromaeosaurids, were dull brown with black stripes. Think scaly reptile.

However, thanks to some groundbreaking finds — and funds to update and restore the museum's entire Third Planet Exhibit — they will soon look birdlike, with bright yellow faces and bodies covered in coarse brown and black feathers.

Yes, feathers.

The need for such updates is common these days. Paleontologists have made great strides over the past 34 years in refining when animals began to have feathers, leaving museum officials and textbook authors scrambling to catch up.

"That's the difficulty with those exhibits. The science changes so fast, and we just don't have the budget to change it every year ... or even every 10 years," said Patricia Coorough Burke with a laugh. Burke is the Curator of Geology Collections and Senior Collection Manager at the Milwaukee Public Museum.

Paleontologists already suspected that birds were related to dinosaurs when the exhibit opened, though remains of feathered dromaeosaurids were still undiscovered. The excavation site at Hell Creek in Montana that formed the basis for the dinosaur diorama provided only fragmented skeletons of the animals.

Bones can provide a significant amount of information when reconstructing a dinosaur, such as size and overall shape. More rigorous examination can show where muscles attached and how they laid over the bone. Unfortunately, no details can be deduced about soft tissues like feathers and skin.

As a result, the museum staff at the time chose to paint the dromaeosaurids in colors that fit expectations. “We were playing on what everybody’s vision at the time was,” said Wendy Christensen, the museum’s veteran taxidermist.

However, fossils collected over the past three decades have expanded the knowledge of feathered dinosaurs and provided an increasingly intricate picture of what they looked like.

“Some of the finds out of China are so clear,” said Burke. “Everything is preserved. I mean you can see the feathers clearly attached.”

Only a few sites in the world possessed the right conditions to preserve the delicate features of feathers. Since the 1990s, Liaoning, China, has provided many remarkable examples of insects, fish, salamanders and feathered relatives of the Museum’s dromaeosaurids.

When the creatures died at the Liaoning site, fine-grained ash from nearby volcanoes gently entombed them and created detailed impressions of feathers, fur and skin texture. In some cases, paleontologists have even found hints of color patterns.

Despite these exciting finds, a question remained: Could the museum assume that the Hell Creek dromaeosaurids had feathers like their relatives from the other side of the world?

Indeed, they can. The fossil record indicates that animals from Asia and North America were very similar during the time of the dromaeosaurids at Hell Creek and that migrations occurred between the two regions until the time of their extinction.

Now supported by a foundation of evidence, the Milwaukee Public Museum is bringing the modern dromaeosaurid to life.

Large, bird-like feathers will be added to the arms and tails of the dinosaurs. Maddy Dall, the artist working on the project, explained that these feathers will be made of plastic to ensure they can withstand repeated cleanings and any encounters with human visitors. More specifically, plastic feathers will help the dromaeosaurids withstand lots and lots of little fingers.

The rest of the body will look like it is covered in primitive, quill-like feathers. Scientists currently believe that these feathers kept the animal warm and were not used for flight.

Christensen has already given one dromaeosaurid a thick, coarse coat of “quills” using two hides from javelinas, wild pigs found in the desert Southwest. Finding four matching hides for a larger dromaeosaurid has been more challenging. According to Christensen, “(Javelinas) are very common animals, but not everybody has them in their freezer right now.”

Both Dall and Christensen admit that sometimes educated guessing is involved when it comes to facts the fossil record has yet to clarify, like coloration.

Christensen wanted the dromaeosaurids to be bright yet believable, and ultimately chose the yellow-headed vulture as her inspiration. “I kind of looked at (dromaeosaurids) almost as being vulturine, with the bare heads because they’d be digging into carcasses.”

In addition to painting the dinosaurs' faces bright yellow and blue, Dall has reshaped their heads, added textural details to their skin, and "cut off the old hands because they were very Frankenstein-like." The freshly sculpted claws look much more lethal.

Christensen and Dall hope to finish the project by the end of the summer, but no defined timeline has been set. There’s no instruction booklet for feathering a dinosaur, after all.

Regardless, they seem to be enjoying their time with the dromaeosaurids. As Dall said, “It’s kind of fun to tell people that your job right now is sculpting a dinosaur.”