Yesterday I had the great privilege of going behind-the-scenes at the Royal Ontario Museum, that incredible home of extraordinary specimens and rare artifacts, items that seem to have a life unlike anything else in our world. I was there representing Canada AM, part of a team that was shooting an upcoming story on how the museum is introducing an array of new technologies to help them expand the number of specimens on display while adding more depth to the information and stories they can offer. It’s an interesting tale and one I’ll leave for our show to air (coming soon), but what I want to share with you today, is the extraordinary thing that happened after we finished our shoot, the things you would only dream of happening should you be so lucky to visit the hidden sections of a museum, things we did not, could not grab with our cameras, moments that gave me so much pause as to seem to permanently effect the way I breathe, now a little bit slower and more deeply.

Note: Those of you following me on my Twitter account got to see some of these photos and details as they happened. 

As a little boy I was passionately intrigued by the R.O.M., by the dinosaur skeletons that continue to fascinate hundreds of thousands of kids today, with their looming stature, menacing teeth and the promise of monsters that really do exist, as well as the suits of armor with elaborate visors that seem to hide secrets of a different age when human nature was quite different in quality, and the Scottish Claymores, long swords that seemed impossibly tall to me as a little boy and still do today. Those remain the most popular of the museum’s exhibits, but I was equally fascinated to see everything else, to notice the detail, the very true nature of animals, burial artifacts, and ancient pottery, to walk in with one idea of how these things should look and exist based on what I had seen and read in books and to notice just how different, sometimes wrong even, those perceptions are when you see the item in real life.

As I grew older and continued to voraciously read and to take in science documentaries, I tripped across the wonderful secret that all the exhibit galleries we see and often associate with museums are of course only one part of what the buildings contain, that far behind the twisting stairwells, around the totem poles and the maze-like hallways that lead off behind the posed models of Neanderthals, there is an entire world devoted to research. The items on display are but a fraction of the artifacts museums have in possession and hidden away in the research section of any given museum are the collections galleries, large warehouses filled with motorized storage systems that contain shelves after shelves of artifacts collected from around the world, objects that the public is never allowed to see, preserved only for scientists and researchers to access for study. I’ve watched documentaries where researchers have gone into such a collection gallery, at the Smithsonian or the Natural History Museum in London, pulling out ancient fish from tanks, examining rare beetles in special frames, and looking at bizarre organs in preservation jars. No glass display cases, no velvet ropes, just a pair of white gloves and a great deal of respect and appreciation are all that stand between yourself and such items in the collection galleries. Oh to visit that place. I’ve long dreamed about it. Yesterday I did exactly that.

It wasn’t part of the plan. Originally we were to shoot our piece within a section of the R.O.M. that’s currently under construction, but it still part of the exhibit galleries. To pass the time while our equipment was being set up, I couldn’t help but geek out with the staff at the R.O.M. They’re preparing to launch a new exhibit next month, the Schad Gallery of Bio-Diversity, that will include several extinct and endangered species and I noticed in one of their pamphlets that they will include a skeleton of the DoDo bird. Visibly excited, I peppered them with questions. Is it a full skeleton? Is it a composite of bones from several birds? Extinct since the 17th century, their skeletons are of course extremely rare and each one in existence seems to have its own odd story to come along with it and I was hoping they could tell me more. When we discussed the areas for our segment to take place in, I asked if we could include a moment in one of the collection galleries. After they went off and had a private discussion about it, they said yes.

Paleontologist David Evans took us into the dinosaur collection. The museum has entire collections devoted to different interests. There’s an ichthyology collection for fish, ornithology collection for birds, even a “bug” room. It is as I imagined it, a warehouse with shelving going from the floor to the ceiling, filled with the bones of dinosaurs, in some places merely the skulls or vertebrate of the ancient beasts, in other sections there were entire skeletons. In each case of the main shelves I passed, the items on display there had been pulled out of storage for use in on-going research. There was a formation of duck-billed dinosaurs that showed changes between different specimens. There were jawbones pulled aside for comparison in teeth.

Not all of the items on display were fossils. Through the course of studying the nature of dinosaurs, researchers will compare their fossils against specimens belonging to the larger animals of today. One entire shelving unit, for example, contained the complete set of bones from one elephant. Not just any elephant, but Tantor from the Metro Toronto Zoo. After his passing, the Zoo donated his remains to the R.O.M. for study.

Tantor (left) during his time at the Toronto Zoo 

While you’ll see David’s story on Tantor in our piece, one part of the conversation we did not include is how the museum prepares skeletons from living (formerly) specimens. In most cases they send the body to their peers in the “Bug Room” who use their living specimens to clean the flesh from the bones. In the case of an animal as large as Tantor, they have to use more creative techniques and in his case they actually composted Tantor’s body to hurry up the process. In the case of whales, they will actually bury the carcass and come back for it in a few years.

Tantor's skeleton takes up an entire shelving unit. 

While we didn’t have a lot of time in the collections room, most of which I spent as a host in front of the camera, I did manage to snap a few pics and was pleasantly surprised when David proved game for a shot of me with my head in the maw of one of the skulls. After we took the pic, it took awhile to sink in that, yes, I had just stuck my head into the mouth of a dinosaur, a real dinosaur, and that it wasn’t quite the same as other gag photos I’ve seen where someone jokingly places their head near the mouth of a stuffed bear or lion. It was a bit disconcerting too, just how easily my head could fit between those teeth. Now, had that been the end of my day, it would make for quite an impressive adventure, but as we were leaving, David gave me a considered look and then asked if we would like to visit the laboratory. Yes, of course.

He took us into a room where they prepare incoming specimens. At first I met a young woman in a white lab coat who was sitting in front of large piece of rock, from which she was slowly chipping out what looked like a massive leg bone.

As we passed her, David took me to a table that was supporting a fairly large piece of reddish-brown rock, a square about the size of a laptop that had clearly been cut out of a bigger piece of ground and along its surface was a series of circular dimples.

What was hidden inside? Dinosaur eggs. Not just any dinosaur eggs, but the oldest clutch of eggs ever found. Over 200 million years old, David explained to me that they would have been laid by an animal about sixty feet in size. What was exciting for them was that the formation of the eggs, which were tightly packed together and standing up, was something the dinosaur would have created after laying them. The act of expertly rearranging one’s eggs in a special grouping is behavior that we associate today with birds, not reptiles, and so it shows additional evidence to support a relationship between the dinosaurs of the past with the birds of today.

How extraordinary it was, to stand at their work table, looking down at the eggs in front of my waist, the block of crumbling, cracked rock and the little caps of about eight eggs sticking out of it. Here I was standing in the exact spot of the expert who will continue to work at chipping away and dusting the extraneous rock in order to carefully remove the eggs within. And is it just eggs? David showed me a photograph of a similar set of eggs that have been excavated by another team where, once the excess had been removed, they had found the skeleton of an embryo, the complete set of bones of miniature baby dinosaur. David said that he was quite confident that the fossilized rock sitting right in front of me would have at least one such miniature skeleton. Only time will tell.

Standing on the very next table, to my utter shock and surprise, was the skeleton of the Dodo. It had only been a few hours before that I had geeked out about the existence of the specimen with the museum staff and here by sheer coincidence of my visit to the lab, was the bird in all its unfortunate glory. It was in for restoration and as we came upon the bird its head was resting next to its body on the work table. Almost black in colour, the bird strikes an unmistakable silhouette with its plump body, short wings, and pronounced, comically curved bill. The Dodo of course has taken on an almost mythical importance, partly because it is such an odd-looking character, but mainly because the extinction of its species was the first of real note, the one that finally woke us up to the problem. The tragedy is only emphasized by the bird’s oddball character, its inability to fly and a goofy look that seems to suggest an oblivious nature towards its dismal fate.

Dodo skeleton, Raphus cucullatus, collected 1865. Photo from the ROM Images Archive

It wasn’t until several years after the last Dodo died that it even occurred to anyone to collect or preserve a body for posterity and education, but once the notion hit and the bird became part of popular culture, a craze developed that sent all sorts of eccentrics on a hunt for the few remaining skeletons that could be found. People saw the DoDo as representative of our own self-destructive nature, they looked towards it as holding secrets to the theories of evolution, and the strange importance sent off amateur biologists, manic collectors, and sideshow barters to snatch up the few specimens in existence, to manufacture skeletons using pieces from multiple birds, and in many cases change the shape of the birds to suit their own needs, adding manufactured bones to suit their image of what the bird looked like.

When we interrupted the two curators who were working on the bird, they were involved in a deep discussion as to how to fix the skeleton they had received. Since it has been assembled back in the 1600’s the bird had gone through many hands, changing its shape to the point where it was, in the opinion of the museum, wrong, very wrong.

The wings had been placed in front of the rib cage instead of over the ribs, the sternum was too far back, pushed there by rips that someone thought to extend and make longer. There was a list of changes that its curators wanted to make, but sadly not enough time between now and its scheduled debut to achieve them all, although both men expressed their dedication to find a way somehow.

The wonderful thing about the Dodo is, that no matter how the birds are rearranged or tampered with, their distinct character and personality always shines through. There’s something about the creature that seems to effect all who encounter it, an obsession, a mania, to try to deliver it a kind of justice. Everyone seems motivated to try to present the bird true to how it really looked, true to its nature which was so quickly discarded and used by humanity. The DoDo inspires a drive in its admirers to try to restore the bird its dignity, which by the very virtue of its own nature, it can’t seem to have.

I don’t have photos of either the eggs or the Dodo to offer simply because it would not have been right to take any, both pieces were works-in-progress, and their reveal are moments that belong to the museum. We’ll get to see them in their glory soon enough.

I’m still reeling from the experience of my visit, from the impact of seeing such artifacts up close, but also the sheer luck of not only being given access to the collections area, but of also walking into the lab on the one day where both the oldest dinosaur eggs and one of the world’s few Dodo skeletons just happen to be on the work tables.

As I walked home, playing the experience over in my mind, I looked down and noticed that my backpack, the one I had set down a couple of times in that back area, was covered in dust, the dust of dinosaurs.