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The skeleton of a 42-foot-long dinosaur posted from Wyoming to Denmark found itself in the Capital of Switzerland after it took a wrong turn.
Knewz.com has learned that the senders and the receivers, despite measures in place to track the bones, were at one point completely oblivious to the prehistoric specimen’s whereabouts.
Christoffer Knuth, who runs the Museum of Evolution in Denmark where said specimen now resides, explained what happened saying:
“The specimen was shipped directly from Utah, but mistakenly registered in customs upon arrival in Switzerland.”
“This registration error extended the normally one-week transit period to two weeks before the shipment continued to Denmark.”
He went on to acknowledge that the fossil was exceptionally well preserved calling it “a world-class specimen.”
While the unique goods took a detour and arrived later than planned, the circumstances surrounding its transit could have been less favorable.
Levi Shinkle, a former collections manager at Wyoming Dinosaur Center recalled a time when one such fossil was shipped to Germany.
“We shipped one to Germany in 2021, and it took forever to get there.”
“It definitely spent some time in a warehouse overseas while we were trying to figure out where it was or how to get it there. Another time, we were told a dinosaur was somewhere between Los Angeles and Frankfurt. It ended up being held up in customs in London.”
He went on to say that dinosaurs are known to sprout customs and excise issues—but that is not the only problem.
“If you use any container or crate that contains solid wood (to package the dinosaur remains), it has to be certified so you don't accidentally send an invasive species to another country,” Shinkle explained.
“If you make it all out of plywood, it's not an issue, but plywood isn't as strong as solid wood.”
But the people in the dinosaur mailing business also have their eye on conservation.
“We'd get stamped crates back from other countries, rebuild from those stamped crates, and add new plywood and stuff like that," Shinkle explained.
“And we used boxes with cut and glued pieces of plywood as supports to make them stronger. We got a lot of use out of recycling.”
Notably, with Wyoming not being a shipping hub, packaging tends to be a combination of rudimentary and improvised.
“To get good padding, we would go to the local quilt store and wrap the fossils in quilt batting,” Shinkle explained.
“Then we would use household foam insulation because it comes in sheets of the same size as plywood. We'd stack those, cut out holes, put the fossils in those holes, and pack it with the batting and stuff so it wouldn't move around.”
“From a shipping standpoint, it's just shipping a bunch of rocks,” Shinkle concluded.
The current dinosaur, a herbivorous sauropod named Camarasaurus most commonly from the Late Jurassic Period more than 146 million years ago, comprises 97% of its bones, some of which are still connected.
It was discovered in Ten Sleep, Wyoming in 2017 and excavated in May 2019, per the Cowboy State Daily.