It has been a great honor to work with the esteemed Bruce Museum, and their brilliant Curator, Dr. Dan Ksepka, on this project. The museum is under construction now and their expansion, set to open in October, will include tons of new content including dioramas depicting the paleontology of Connecticut.

The CT state fossil is Eubrontes, a type (an ichnogenus, actually) of fossil footprint from the Lower Jurassic. These prints were published in 1845 by Hitchcock, who took them to be the tracks of a giant bird. It is still not known for certain what dinosaur made these tracks but they match very closely with Dilophosaurus. Therefore Dr. Ksepka commissioned me to build this reconstruction of Dilophosaurus for a new Lower Jurassic habitat diorama.

We began planning on this project in 2018 and originally I think it was supposed to be finished in 2019. Along the way there was a slight bump in the road; a GLOBAL PANDEMIC! Dan was extremely understanding about my multiple and lengthy delays in production. And we did get very lucky in one respect: the amazingly thorough new monograph published by Doctors Adam Marsh and Timothy Rowe (Marsh, A., & Rowe, T. (2020). A comprehensive anatomical and phylogenetic evaluation of Dilophosaurus wetherilli (Dinosauria, Theropoda) with descriptions of new specimens from the Kayenta Formation of northern Arizona. Journal of Paleontology, 94(S78), 1-103. doi:10.1017/jpa.2020.14). Their exhaustive work spared us the guesswork that so many previous reconstructions of Dilophosaurus required.

Here are a whole bunch of photos from the building of the model.