2023-06-24 03:30:05
Journalists from The world‘s science and medicine section have selected five must-see exhibitions. In addition to the unmissable Ramses II at La Villette and the feline family at the Natural History Museum, you can also discover the history in the Seine-Maritime department of the largest statue of Apollo discovered in Gaul.
The resurrection of a marine reptile in Sarthe
The elasmosaurus from Saint-Rémy-du-Val (Sarthe), at the Green Museum in Le Mans, on September 9, 2022. LE MANS MUSEUMS
At the time, Europe was an archipelago, with only the Massif Central, the Armorican Massif and the Vosges mountains emerging from France. Dinosaurs ruled the land and marine reptiles were the masters of the oceans. This was the Jurassic, one of the three great periods, along with the Triassic and Cretaceous that form the Mesozoic (from 252 to 66 million years ago). The shallow seas lining our coasts were populated by elasmosaurus, a marine reptile that could measure up to 12 meters and weigh over 2 tons. Its neck accounted for more than half its body, and it had a relatively small head with which it could only eat fish, ammonites and squid.
Around 165 million years later, in 1864, in the town of Saint-Rémy-du-Val (Sarthe), located 30 kilometers from Le Mans, roadworks unearthed the remains of one of these creatures. Although damaged and highly fragmented (some 50 vertebrae, a few ribs and bone fragments from the fins were found), it was the most complete marine reptile discovered in France and remains an important milestone in the evolution of this family.
The 5-meter-long skeleton is the centerpiece of an exhibition at the Musée Vert in Le Mans entitled “Géants, au Temps des Dinosaures” (Giants, the Time of Dinosaurs). Sylvain Duffaud, a vertebrate paleontologist and restorer, carried out a major project to complete the skeleton. To do this, he went to the Musée de Millau et des Grands Causses (Aveyron), where another elasmosaurus from the same period, almost complete but smaller in size (4 meters), was discovered in the 1990s. He scanned every bone, which he then scaled thanks to the advice of paleontologist Peggy Vincent, a specialist in marine reptiles. As the skull was completely crushed, he virtually “uncrushed” it and “salvaged” a few teeth, enabling him to resculpt its dentition.
After digitizing the Le Mans specimen and digitally comparing the two skeletons, he printed the missing elements using photopolymerization (a process that consists of solidifying liquid resin using UV light). The end result has a precision of 50 micrometers. A slight color variation differentiates the original bones from those that have been printed. This mission, which took six months of full-time work, confirmed, among other things, that the animal was not as large as usually depicted. “He was more slender than we thought, even though we already had some clues. It came as a bit of a surprise,” said the paleontologist.
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