Too Pink! New Máximo Dinosaur is Repainted at Field on Opening Weekend to Fix Color

Máximo, the Field Museum's brand new prehistoric showpiece, is already getting a makeover.

The good news about the 122-foot-long titanosaur skeleton cast in Stanley Field Hall is that it is mounted and looking impressive, standing two stories high in the museum's central hall.

The bad news is that the color of the paint on the skeleton’s resin-and-fiberglass bone replicas wasn't quite right, meaning the creature remained surrounded by stepladders, workers and temporary fencing on Friday, the originally planned opening day.

The difference was subtle but plain enough to anybody comparing the skeleton of the Patagotitan mayorum with the five nearby real fossil bones from the recently discovered species, the largest yet found.

The real ones, which got their coloration from a million years in what is now clay-rich Argentinian soil, have dusty tones of “red wine and chocolate,” said Alvaro Amat, the museum's design director. The ones on Máximo were originally given a reddish purple hue by the workers from the Patagonian museum that made the cast of its prized discovery.

That may have worked in a darker, smaller hall at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, where there is another Patagotitan model on display. But in the bright, airy surroundings of Stanley Field Hall, the coloration looked too “pink,” in the word of one Field exhibit executive.

And too fresh, as well. You could almost look at the purplish hip bones, for instance, and imagine tendons and such having recently been pulled off.

So the workers are staying on a little longer, maybe a week or so, to get the tones just right. And Máximo, although entirely visible now, remains a dinosaur-in-progress.

Source: www.orlandosentinel.com