Animating the extinct

This sumptuous video features on our brand new Out of the Deep display and brings to life the two large marine reptile skeletons seen in the cases. The Museum exhibition team worked with Martin Lisec of Mighty Fossils, who specialise in palaeo reconstructions. Martin and his animators also created a longer video explaining how the long-necked plesiosaur became fossilised, as well as beautiful illustrations of life in the Jurassic seas. 
Martin explains the process of animating these long-extinct creatures:

The first step was to make 3D models of all the animals that would appear in the films or illustrations. After discussion with the Museum team, it was clear that we would need two plesiosaurs (one short-necked, known as a pliosaur, one long-necked), ammonites, belemnites and other Jurassic sea life. Now we were able to define the scale of detail, size and texture quality of the model.

In consultation with Dr. Hilary Ketchum, the palaeontologist on the project, we gathered important data, including a detailed description of the discovered skeletons, photographs, 3D scans, and a few sketches.

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We created the first version of the model to determine proportions and a body shape. After several discussions with Hilary, some improvements were made and the ‘primal model’ of the long-necked plesiosaur was ready for the final touches – adding details, mapping, and textures. We could then move on to create the other 3D models.

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The longer animation was the most time-consuming. We prepared the short storyboard, which was then partly changed during the works, but that is a common part of a creative job. For example, when it was agreed during the process that the video would contain description texts, it affected the speed and length of the whole animation – obviously, it has to be slower so that people are able to watch and read all important information properly.

A certain problem appeared when creating the short, looped animation. The first picture had to precisely follow the last one – quite a difficult goal to reach in case of underwater scenery. Hopefully no-one can spot the join!

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At this moment we had a rough animation to be finalised. We had to make colour corrections, add effects and sound – everything had to fit perfectly. After the first version, there were a few more with slight adjustments of animation, cut and text corrections. The final version of both animations was ready and then rendered in different quality and resolution for use in the display and online.

The last part of the project was creating a large illustration, 12,000 x 3,000 pixels, which would be used as a background for a large display panel. Text, diagrams and a screen showing the animations would be placed on this background, making the composition a little tricky. We agreed that the base of the illustration would be just the background. The underwater scene and creatures were placed in separate layers so that it would be easy to adjust them – move them, change their size, position etc.

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In the first phase, we had to set the colour scale to achieve the proper look of the warm and shallow sea, then we made rough sketches of the scene including seabed and positions of individual creatures. We had to make continuous adjustments as the display design developed.

Then we finished the seabed with vegetation, gryphaea shells and plankton floating in the water. The final touch was to use lighting to create an illusion of depth for the Jurassic creatures to explore.

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More Out of the Deep videos are available on the Museum website.

Pieces of a plesiosaur

We’ve just opened a brand new, permanent display called Out of the Deep, featuring two beautifully preserved plesiosaur skeletons. Remarkably, both of these marine reptile fossils have skulls, which is more unusual than you might think. Dr Hilary Ketchum, collections manager in the Museum’s Earth Collections and curator of Out of the Deep, describes how the skull of the long-necked plesiosaur made it safely from a quarry to a museum display.

At the bottom of a clay pit in 2014, palaeontologists from the Oxford Clay Working Group discovered a 165-million-year-old fossil plesiosaur skeleton, and they knew they had found something special. Plesiosaur bones are fairly common in the quarry, but skeletons are rare. Skeletons with skulls are rarer still. Fantastically, at the end of their newly-found plesiosaur’s neck was a skull. Barely visible underneath the clay, only the tip of the snout and a few teeth were exposed.

Can you see the skull? Fossil hunting in the quarry takes time, patience and a good eye to distinguish between bones and clay. Image: Mark Wildman, Oxford Clay Working Group.

Plesiosaur skulls are usually made up of around 33 bones, not including the tiny bones from inside the eye sockets, called the sclerotic ring. The skull bones are among the smallest and most fragile in the entire skeleton. This means they are much less likely to be preserved, and less likely to be discovered, than the larger and more robust backbones and limb bones.

A plaster jacket was made around the skull while still in the quarry.
Image: Mark Wildman, Oxford Clay Working Group.

When the plesiosaur skeleton arrived in the Museum in 2015, the skull and some of the surrounding clay was encased in its protective plaster field jacket. As tempting as it was, instead of cracking open the jacket straight away, we decided on a more technological approach. Professor Roger Benson and Dr James Neenan took the specimen to the Royal Veterinary College to use their enormous CT scanner, normally used for scanning horses and other large animals, and took thousands of X-rays of the jacket. This allowed them to build up a 3D model of the fossil inside – our first tantalising glimpse of the whole skull!

The CT scan of the plaster jacket (left) revealed the location of the skull inside the jacket (middle). The jacket was then digitally removed (right) to reveal a 3D image of the skull.

Having the CT scan of the skull was like having a picture on a puzzle box
Juliet Hay, Earth Collections conservator and preparator

Although the CT scan was incredibly useful, we still had to proceed with the preparation with caution. It was possible that not all of the bones had not been detected by the scanner, especially the incredibly thin bones of the palate.

After opening the plaster jacket, Juliet began to carefully remove the clay from around the fossil bone.

Slowly and carefully, Juliet and I removed the soft clay from around the skull. The weight of clay pressing on top of the skull for millions of years had crushed it, breaking some of the bones into a lot of smaller pieces. In order to keep track of them we attached a number to each piece of bone and photographed it from several different angles before removing it from the jacket.

Each individual bone was mapped using a numbering system. The numbers were attached with the conservation adhesive Paraloid B72 in acetone, so that they could be easily removed later.
The plesiosaur’s pointed teeth being revealed.

When all the bones had finally been removed from the clay, we had over 250 pieces. Next came the challenge of the three-dimensional jigsaw!

With knowledge about plesiosaur skulls from my PhD, and some extra expert help from Roger Benson and Dr Mark Evans, Curator of Natural Science and Archaeology, New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, I was able to build up the skull, piece by piece, until it was nearly whole again.

After many months of painstaking work, the beautifully preserved skull of this long-necked plesiosaur can finally be seen in the Out of the Deep display.

Amazingly, the skull is even more complete and more beautifully preserved than we could tell from the CT scan. The sutures between the individual bones can be seen in exquisite detail, and even though I work with fossils every day, I still find it amazing that it is 165 million years old.

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With special thanks to:

Oxford Clay Working Group: Mark Wildman, Carl Harrington, Shona Tranter, Cliff Nicklin, Heather Middleton, and Mark Graham, who uncovered and excavated the long-necked plesiosaur.

Forterra, for generously donating the plesiosaur skeleton to the Museum, after it was discovered in a Forterra quarry. 

How to build a plesiosaur, in 836 easy steps

By Rachel Parle, Public Engagement Manager

Fitting together the remains of long-dead sea creatures is no easy job. A brand new permanent display, Out of the Deep, has brought together two Jurassic marine reptiles in the largest new display in the Museum for decades. But getting them out on show was a long, delicate process that took hundreds of careful steps.

The specimens are rare and remarkably complete, and on full display for the first time. The short-necked plesiosaur, known as a pliosaur, was discovered by a former Museum curator in the 1990s in Yarnton, Oxfordshire, just a few miles from the Museum.

The larger long-necked plesiosaur was found in a quarry in Cambridgeshire in 2014 by the Oxford Clay Working Group, and donated to the Museum’s collections by the quarry’s owner Forterra. You might remember this fossil from our excited article when the specimen first arrived at the Museum, back in 2016.

Model of the long-necked plesiosaur, made by Crawley Creatures

Before the fossils could take centre stage, their set had to be built, in the shape of two enormous display cases, designed and constructed to house these special specimens. Every day, for two weeks, the team from showcase specialists Click Netherfield pieced together slabs of glass, built walls, installed lights and fitted portholes. Yes, portholes!

A young visitor peers at the plesiosaur through a porthole

The display is positioned in the south aisle of the Museum – if you know the building, this is on the right as you come in, alongside large dinosaur skeletons. We’d measured and planned the space again and again, with our designers Calum Storrie and Pat O’Leary, but couldn’t quite picture this huge display sitting alongside the other cases. Each specimen is almost five metres in length, so the cases really are whoppers. Once the pieces started to come together, we could see that this was going to a really dramatic addition to the Museum. We chose a clean, contemporary look, with lots of glass and powder-coated steel. The colour of the metal case was carefully chosen to stand out (no oak-effect), but sit well in amongst the warm tones of the stone and brick work – RAL 7032 if you’re interested!

Here’s a time-lapse video to show you how the cases were built, piece by piece over two weeks.

Once the enormous cases were in place, we could start installing the stars of the show – the two plesiosaur skeletons. Museum staff had worked closely with Richard Rogers Conservation to build an intricate web of steel that would hold each fragment of the skeleton in place, showing it off to its full potential. This mount was screwed into place on the acrylic base board then the individual bones were gently slotted into place.

Richard Rogers slots a vertebra into place on the carefully-crafted mount
Richard Rogers and James Dawson position plesiosaur ribs

Here’s a glimpse of the installation process in a handy time-lapse film:

After countless of hours of excavation, preparation, planning, measuring (measuring again) and installing, Out of the Deep is ready! It’s open now in the Museum and the specimens are accompanied by specially commissioned digital reconstructions (more about that soon), videos that share the stories behind the specimens’ discovery and even a touchable 3D print of a plesiosaur flipper. Come along and meet the Jurassic beasts that deserved all this care and attention.

The finished Out of the Deep display is open now

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The project has been generously supported by grants from the DCMS/Wolfson Museums and Galleries Improvement Fund, and WREN’s FCC Community Action Fund.