The American Museum of Natural History has moved a giant dinosaur. Twice.

This article is part of the special Fine Arts and Exhibitions section on how creativity can inspire in difficult times.

Arranging suitable accommodations for an unexpected visitor can be a challenge, especially when the guest is 11 feet tall and 27 feet long. The American Museum of Natural History did it twice in less than a year for one of the largest and most complete stegosaurus skeletons in the world.

The skeleton, aptly named Apex, is on loan to the museum. It includes about 80 percent of the dinosaur’s estimated 320 fossilized bones.

The time from discovery to exhibition was so fast that the museum had to find a suitable space to display it – although there was no doubt it would succeed. “To get something this complete and in such good condition is very rare,” said Melissa Posen, senior director of exhibition operations at the New York museum.

The museum first installed Apex last December in an atrium of the Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation, five months after hedge fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin bought the 150 million-year-old fossil at auction for $44.6 million, about 10 times the pre-sale estimate. The exhibit gave the public an opportunity to see the elephant-sized skeleton, with its distinctive rows of bony plates on either side of its spine, but museum staff did not have enough time to prepare informative and educational exhibits, nor for paleontologists to fully examine individual fossils.

The institution therefore removed Apex from public view in early September, a museum spokeswoman said, in order to move the dinosaur, which dates from the late Jurassic period, to a more appropriate location. Its new home is adjacent to the museum’s Dinosaur and Fossil Rooms, which also house well-known reptiles like the T. rex and Titanosaur. Moving Apex to the fourth floor also allowed the museum to include more exhibits and other information about the dinosaur.

The move required the fossil’s researcher, Jason Cooper, a commercial paleontologist, to remove each fossilized bone from the armature, or metal frame, that gave the assemblage the familiar stegosaur shape. One of his colleagues, Zoltan Faltay, made the frame to display the fossils at Sotheby’s auction in July 2024. When Apex was moved, the frame was dismantled and moved as well.

Dismantling Apex gave museum scientists the opportunity to carefully document the size, shape and structure of each fossil. This data will be made available to paleontologists around the world and could help them answer fundamental questions about stegosaurs, such as how quickly they grew and how long they lived.

Apex was expected to reopen to the public in its new home in mid-to-late October. He is expected to stay there until the end of 2028, when Griffin could extend the loan.

While Cooper said the move could have been accomplished in less than a week, the museum removed Apex from display for more than a month to give scientists time to digitally document each of the approximately 250 fossils that make it up.

“This month-long period where the specimen is taken apart has been our opportunity to study various aspects of the bones,” said Roger Benson, the museum’s curator of fossil amphibians, reptiles, birds and plants, as the moving process began. “We already had excellent 3D surface models of the skeleton, but those models generally don’t tell us what is restored and what is original.”

Dismantling the dinosaur by extracting each fossil from the frame and placing them in custom-made polyurethane foam pads inside handmade wooden crates took less than two days, as did reversing the process on the fourth floor. Cooper managed the work on both sides with the help of two employees.

In the meantime, Benson and Robert Smyth, a postdoctoral researcher on a three-year fellowship funded by Griffin, used various processes to piece together the images of the fossils. Structured light technology allowed them to create exceptionally detailed external 3D images and print 3D copies; infrared scans allowed them to distinguish the original fossil bones and keratin from the restorative materials; and CT scans revealed the interior structure of each fossil.

“It shows precisely, very completely and clearly, the difference between the real material and the restored material in three dimensions,” Benson said. “It’s especially important for the skull. The skull, you see, contains a lot of original material, but it can be quite difficult to distinguish the original from the restored material just by looking from the outside.”

It was important to collect as much data as possible in the limited time available because Apex is owned by an individual and not an institution. This has raised concerns about scientists’ access to such an important fossil discovery.

“The fossil is private property, but one of our jobs here is to record with high precision scientific data – precise, high-resolution scientific data – that can be available in perpetuity,” Benson said at the height of his data collection effort. “That’s why this is a really crucial time for us.”

Benson also had permission from Griffin to take a small sample of Apex’s largest bone, his 45-inch-long femur. The scientist said he was interested in the internal structure of the bone, which grew layer by layer, leaving a trace of the animal’s life. “This includes things like annual growth marks, which look a bit like tree rings,” he added.

Combining information from Apex, which he described as “a large, old individual,” with information from other stegosaurs of different sizes and ages could help paleontologists learn more about the life history of these slow-moving herbivores. Apex is unlikely to settle the debate over the usefulness of a stegosaurus’s signature physical trait, the ostentatious bony plates that run along its spine (probably “ornamental structures similar to the plumage of birds or the frills of some lizards,” Benson said). However, Apex can help paleontologists infer how quickly stegosaurs grew and how long they tend to live.

Judging by its large size and fused vertebrae, Apex had a long life and a peaceful death. The skeleton shows no signs of battle wounds or post-mortem excavation by other animals. “If you combine size, completeness and preservation of the bones, this is the best Stegosaurus I’ve seen,” Rod Scheetz, curator of the Brigham Young University Museum of Paleontology, told the New York Times after inspecting the fossils before they were sold.

Cooper said he discovered Apex while he and a friend were looking for fossils on property Cooper owns in Moffat County, Colorado, near a town aptly named Dinosaur. “We actually found two stegosaurs that day,” he said in an interview at the museum early in the disassembly process. “They were a few hundred yards apart. At first I thought it was the less complete of the two because he was curled up back. His back was sticking out so I thought the whole thing was gone.”

So Apex “stayed in the ground while we dug the other one,” Cooper recalls. “He was underground for over a year.

“Once we got in there, we realized he was curled up on himself. It was a super happy moment,” he said. “I got everyone together – the whole team – and we were able to do all the mapping and excavation in 10 days, because it was October and we didn’t want to leave it during the winter.

The discovery of Apex certainly raised Cooper’s public profile. Apex’s display should do the same for the American Museum of Natural History.

Stegosaurus is one of the most well-known dinosaurs, but there is still much to learn. Having a nearly complete skeleton can help answer these scientific questions. It is also a spectacle that can mark a lifetime.

“We want people to say ‘wow!’ when they see it,” Posen said.

Megan McCrea contributed reporting.