LOS ANGELES — The Natural History Museum is introducing a new 4-legged friend to Los Angeles: Gnatalie the dinosaur!
Thanks to National Geographic, ABC7 is giving you a sneak peek.
“Gnatalie was found in the Badlands of Utah in 2007, so it’s been almost 17 years putting Gnatalie together for this display,” said Chris Weisbart, the Associate Vice President of Exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
According to the Natural History Museum, dozens of people from L.A. were part of the excavation process for the long-neck dinosaur, including paleontologists, researchers, and volunteers.
That’s why Gnatalie is being nicknamed “The community dinosaur.”
About 80% of the dinosaur is real. It’s a composite of multiple dinosaurs, all belonging to the same species, weighing about five tons, or as much as an RV.
“Gnatalie is a diplodocid dinosaur, which means that it walked on land,” said Weisbart. “It ate plants. It was enormously long. It’s almost 75 feet long. The skeleton itself, and it lived about 150 million years ago.”
The minerals in the riverbed where Gnatalie’s fossils were found is what gives the dinosaur its green color, the only green-boned dinosaur on display in the world.
“Gnatalie was named for the biting gnats that are in this area of the Utah Badlands. The excavation teams go out for months at a time in the summer, and it’s very hot and very filled with biting insects,” Weisbart said.
From 2007, the bones have gone through a lengthy, painstaking excavation as featured in the September issue of National Geographic. Nat Geo’s exclusive on the reconstructed dinosaur can be found at NatGeo.com.
You can visit Gnatalie at the Natural History Museum in Exposition Park starting November 17. The exhibit is free.
The Walt Disney Company is the parent company of National Geographic and this ABC Station.
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