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No Comments [ Add Comment ]Ready to play with the big boys?
By Nancy Van ValkenburgMarilyn and Ron Harris were thrilled to hear their daughter and granddaughter got to see "Walking With Dinosaurs" when the traveling show visited Oregon.
"They said it was spellbinding" said Marilyn Harris, 69, of North Ogden. "The robotics in it are over the top, and the dinosaurs, operated by mechanics and human puppeteers inside, are absolutely wonderful."
"Walking With Dinosaurs" is coming to the EnergySolutions Arena in Salt Lake City for eight shows starting Wednesday, bringing 15 life-size "dinosaurs" that cost about $20 million to develop and build.
In some of the larger beasts, the lizard-like skin hides as many as three people: a driver and two puppeteers, who manipulate the dinosaur legs, neck, mouth and eyes. Each of the 10 large dinosaurs weighs about the same as a standard car.
Harris and husband Ron, who turns 74 this month and describes himself as "an inch short of being a dinosaur," haven't bought tickets to the show yet, and probably won't.
"It's too expensive," Marilyn Harris said. "It's 20-some dollars for the nosebleed section. Besides, we get to work with dinosaurs all the time."
The Harrises volunteer to work with real dinosaur bones in two area laboratories. They help prepare bones for study at the Utah Museum of Natural History at the University of Utah, and they do similar work at Ogden's George S. Eccles Dinosaur Park.
Besides more than 100 outdoor dinosaur sculptures, the Ogden park has indoor exhibits and an education center, along with a paleo lab where the Harrises and other volunteers work on bones that arrive from the Utah Museum of Natural History.
"They say every kid loves a monster," Marilyn Harris said. "And some of us never grow up."
Marilyn, who used to manage the now-closed Jolene's clothing outlet, and Ron, a retired big-equipment mechanic and retired Air Force sergeant, were strolling through the natural history museum about a decade ago when they asked a staffer "whether they let dummies play with bones," Marilyn Harris said.
"She told us yes, and there was a training class for volunteers that was about to start. So our involvement in the program was accidental."
The couple, longtime rockhounds, have since found themselves working with the bones of a ceratopsian, several hadrosauruses ("duck-billed" dinosaurs), a juvenile tyrannosaurus, and a therezinosaurus that may have lived during the period in which the species evolved from carnivore to herbivore.
"This guy was 3 feet at the hip area, 7 to 9 feet long, and had claws the size of my index finger," Marilyn Harris said. "He's the great-grandkid of some they found in the Gobi Desert of China, which grew claws as large as 5 feet."
The Harrises and other volunteers remove the protective plaster casts that diggers applied in the field. Workers clean off sediment, and use glue to refasten any bone fragments that have come loose.
"My husband says it's like doing a jigsaw puzzle, except there's no picture on the box," Harris said.
Once bones are cleaned and strengthened, they are returned to the University of Utah, where they will be available for study by researchers.
"We learn something new every day," Marilyn Harris said. "We love it. We've definitely got a bad case of the 'dinopox.' "
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