Curator, Tracey-Ann Hooley and Exhibition Designer, Richard Glover create a showcase template, placing objects within helping with the process of designing showcase of Victorian birds for the upcoming Wild: amazing animals in a changing world exhibition.

Wow look at me I'm being installed into the new exhibition. My friend Dean has been working really hard to make me look good, you can see him on the ground sorting out my tail.

Credit: Melinda Iser; Source: Museum Victoria

Rencently we installed a Quetzalcoatlus at Melbourne Museum for the upcoming Dinosaur Walk exhibition. It ‘s a huge pterosaur with a wingspan of up to 15 metres - the largest flying creature of all time and existed the very end of the Cretaceous period. Being such a large animal it was suprisingly light and probably weighed no more than 100 kilograms.

Credit: Rodney Start, Source: Melbourne Museum

Museum staff installs temporary signage advertising the upcoming Dinosaur Walk exhibition

Credit: Melinda Iser, Source: Museum Victoria

Credit:Benjamin Healley, Source: Museum Victoria

The science and life design team have backgrounds in exhibition design, industrial design, interior design and graphic design. They are creating dynamic environments for the display and interpretation of heritage collection material for this development project.

Concept drawing & elevation of Dinosaur Walk exhibition showing viewing platform.

Credit: Richard Glover, Source: Museum Victoria

Platform template placed in space to establish hanging points in the ceiling| 3D rendered drawing of platform in space.

Credit: Melinda Iser, source: Museum Victoria | Credit: Peter Wilson, Source: Museum Victoria

Fossilised dinosaur bones with comb for scale

Today I have been writing words that will be part of a new exhibition. It’s a new exhibition with an old theme – dinosaurs and other pre-historic life.  According to my text there is going to be a fossil hairdresser in it. Well it isn’t actually a fossil hairdresser, that’s just what spell check came up with when I typed Hadrosaur. We have this fossil of a Hadrosaur (duck–billed dinosaur) – still embedded in a chunk of rock which came all the way from Alberta, Canada. At the museum it is affectionately called the headless hadrosaur because there is no skull fossil. It does however have imprints of dinosaur skin, and when you think of it, 70 million year old skin is pretty impressive (probably in need of a beauty therapist rather than a hairdresser).  

The collection manager here at the museum is going to look closely around the fossil in the hope of finding some more skin. There are stories of similar fossils where the people preparing them (cleaning away the rock and just leaving the fossil), failed to recognise the skin imprints and destroyed them in the process of getting to the bones. I guess skin imprints are a rare thing and like a lot of palaeontology you really have to know what you are looking for, you must have a mental search pattern. There are lots of stories of things being missed and their significance only being ‘seen’ later. Fossilised embryos are a case in point...but that is another story.