Science
A 150-million-year journey from the Jurassic to Exposition Park
150 million years ago, Laurasia
The massive neck dips, casting a curving shadow on the mossy ground. The dinosaur’s jaws close around its prize. The creature lifts its head, nearly dainty in scale, and contentedly gnaws a mouthful of ferns.
It’s the late Jurassic Period in the super continent of Laurasia, some 85 million years into the reign of the dinosaurs. The animal belongs to a herd of hefty herbivores who spend their days lumbering through an open landscape of conifers and gingkos, horsetails and monkey puzzle trees.
Paleontologists and volunteers gather at the dinosaur dig site near Bluff, Utah.
(Courtesy of Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
It’s 10 tons at least, far longer than it is tall, its seemingly endless neck and tail held parallel to the ground in surprisingly delicate balance.
Stubby ankylosaurs graze in the distance; carnivorous allosaurs stalk for prey. Tiny mammals scamper out of the path of its thunderous footsteps.
One day the dinosaur will have a name: Gnatalie. One day it will crisscross continents that don’t yet exist, coming to rest in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.
But all that is a long way off. On this day in prehistory, Los Angeles still lies beneath a shallow sea.
This far back in time, some details are too fuzzy to make out. We don’t know the dinosaur’s sex. We don’t know how it dies: illness or injury, predators or old age. But we know it lives three or four decades, and eventually the day comes when the dinosaur falls and does not rise again for many, many years.
A hungry ecosystem devours its flesh and muscle. Rains come and the dinosaur’s bones wash into a river, where they lodge in the sandy bottom. Flowing water covers them in thin blankets of silt.
This is just the beginning.
80 million to 50 million years ago, Laramidia
Above ground, things live and die and disappear. But the dinosaur, encased in layers of sediment, is exempt from this endless cycle of growth and decay.
Millennia tick past. Those layers of soil compress into rock studded with the remains of forgotten creatures. More time goes by, and as the organic material in the bones wears away, water seeps into its place from the surrounding rock.
The water carries minerals, and with enough time — tens of thousands of years, or millions — mineral deposits fill up the bone-shaped cavities in the rock, creating perfect replicas of teeth that once chewed ferns and tibia that held up a giant.
Hundreds of scientists and volunteers spent more than 10 years excavating the fossils after their discovery in 2007.
(Courtesy of Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
Volcanoes set off a cascade of chemical changes in the environment that make their way to the subterranean rock. The area becomes rich in celadonite, a soft greenish mineral. Over time, the bones concealed in the ground turn the same emerald hue.
Somewhere in there an asteroid strikes, the planet burns, and the dinosaurs’ era comes to an end. Gnatalie’s fossils, already ancient, lie untroubled in Earth’s crust.
6 million years ago, North America
Continents shift and oceans spread. Unseen forces drive a massive plateau of rock upward, carving spectacular features that one day will have names: Grand Canyon, Arches, Monument Valley. Gnatalie rises with it.
2007, Utah
Time passes. Things happen. Ice ages, cave paintings, nation-states, Bach.
The earth the dinosaurs once trod is now a massive expanse of solid rock. The place where Gnatalie’s remains lie has a name: the Colorado Plateau.
The closest town has a name too — Bluff, Utah. Even that small outpost is miles from the desert where a dozen paleontologists are hiking, looking for signs of long-ago life.
In the rock they spy something that is not rock, something surprisingly green. They mark the place and agree to come back.
2008-2019, Utah
Led by Luis Chiappe, director of the Natural History Museum’s Dinosaur Institute, the paleontologists return with generators and tents and jackhammers and dental picks. Amid hordes of gnats they excavate that first fossil, which turns out to be a damaged leg bone.
Scientists Jonatan Kaluza, Fernando, Alyssa Bell and Pedro Mocho work to excavate fossils at the Gnatalie quarry.
(Courtesy of Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County)
Beneath it is another one. And another. The Earth spills secrets like it’s been waiting for someone to ask.
Under the rock is a field of fossils, the commingled remnants of camarasaurs, sauropods, crocodiles, ankylosaurs, ornithopods — everything that washed into that long-gone river 150 million years ago.
The team returns every summer, year after year. Strewn throughout the bone bed are massive relics of something no one can quite identify, a mysterious dinosaur more numerous and better preserved than any other animal.
They nickname the unknown species “Gnatalie,” after the pests that plague them as they work.
The green fossils are each wrapped in a plaster jacket and carefully loaded into a truck for the 700-mile drive to the museum at Exposition Park.
2008-2022, Los Angeles
At the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in rooms the public aren’t allowed to wander, preparators carefully clean, weigh and catalog each fossil. At benches they brush and gently scrape dust from fossilized bone, with the gentle dexterity of dentists cleaning Jurassic-era teeth.
Gnatalie, at this point, is a puzzle waiting to be assembled. But nature doesn’t make this game easy.
The staff has to sort through hundreds of fossils. They know they have found some kind of sauropod — a long-necked, long-tailed quadruped. The strange green dinosaur has the neck of a barosaur, a diplodocus-like spine. A review of the quarry’s haul reveals a long length of vertebrae from a single animal that connects the two and solves the riddle: Gnatalie, Chiappe confirms, is indeed a previously undiscovered species.
Various dinosaur fossils lie in temporary storage at Research Casting International in Trenton, Canada.
(Ian Willms / For The Times)
Dinosaurs are hardly ever found in their entirety, and this one is no exception. From a half-dozen fossil skeletons, paleontologists assemble a representative of the Gnatalie species, their best educated assumption of what the animal looked like. On a computer screen, the dinosaur’s internal architecture is put back together for the first time in millennia.
There are plans for this animal. The museum is opening a new welcome center, and space needs something big and bold. The answer is right there in the prep lab — the world’s only green dinosaur skeleton.
Two hundred bones are packed in crates, each in its own custom foam cradle. They are loaded onto trucks with specialized suspension, and a fleet carrying priceless cargo begins the 2,600-mile journey north.
2022-2024: Trenton, Canada
Research Casting International’s unassuming warehouse sits on the bank of a quiet bay about 100 miles east of Toronto. Outside, beavers gnaw at the vegetation around the chilly waters. Inside is a steampunk fossil carnival.
Fossil mounting technicians Nevin Dallman and Kevin Krudwig perform final adjustments on Gnatalie in RCI’s workshop.
(Ian Willms / For The Times)
In one corner the lanky, headless skeleton of a Quetzalcoatl appears ready to take flight. Welding sparks fly nearby as a worker puts finishing touches on the joints in a replica T-rex toe.
The rearing barosaurus in the rotunda of New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the T-rex and triceratops locked in battle in the Natural History Museum’s main hall in L.A. — all of them first took form here in founder Peter May’s workshop.
And in the back of the cavernous warehouse, in a secure hangar, Gnatalie stands for the first time in 150 million years.
It’s 75 feet from nose to end, longer than the letters in the Hollywood sign are tall. A quirk in the fossilized sacrum, a bone in the lower back, means that the animal’s neck curves slightly to the left, giving the impression of a dinosaur turning its head curiously toward an unexpected sight.
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1. Custom metal reinforcements are fitted to dinosaur fossils. 2. The tail vertebrae of Gnatalie. 3. Mike Pyette prepares a temporary styrofoam skull for Gnatalie. 4. Paleontologist Luis Chiappe inspects “Natalie” at Research Casting International on March 4, 2023, in Trenton, Ontario, Canada. (Photos by Ian Willms/For The Times)
Hand-forged armatures connect some 350 bones to an underlying steel skeleton. Two-thirds are real fossils. The remainder are 3D-printed replicas of pieces nature didn’t preserve well, each hand-painted and textured to match the real bone.
As RCI employees walk through remaining work to be done on the mount, museum staff visiting from Los Angeles mark the location of the future hall’s entryway with painter’s tape on the warehouse floor.
Timelapse video of installation of the 75 feet long dinosaur on display at the Natural History Museum. (Natural History Museum)
“We want that jaw-dropping moment that compels you to want to learn more about the specimen,” says Chris Weisbart, associate vice president for exhibits.
The dinosaur will stand on a specially constructed platform that provides a better view to the public and keeps the neck and tail beyond reach of over-eager visitors tempted to jump up and touch it.
Nature makes most of the decisions about how a dinosaur mount will look, but there is a little room for interpretation within the realm of the scientifically plausible. At the moment, Chiappe, May and paleontologist Pedro Mocho are locked in an intense discussion about the precise positioning of an ulna. Chiappe carries a laptop around the front leg so that Mocho, watching via Zoom from his office in Lisbon, Portugal, can examine the bone.
“It’s a weird angle,” Mocho says finally. The leg needs adjusting.
“We have quite a lot of work to do,” Chiappe says, looking somewhat abashed.
“We have quite a lot of time,” May says with a smile.
2024: Los Angeles
On Sunday the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County will open the long-awaited $75-million NHM Commons expansion.
Earlier in the year the museum asked the public to name their new dinosaur — not the species, which will get its scientific moniker when the long process of publishing the discovery is complete, but the mounted skeleton that people will come to visit, the green dinosaur that belongs to L.A. alone.
Visitors and media view Gnatalie in the new Welcome Center at the NHM Commons on Nov. 13.
(Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)
They threw out some options. Sage, for the native plant and earthy green color? Olive, a symbol of peace? Dinosaur enthusiasts voted to keep the name that stuck as soon as it came out of the Earth: Gnatalie.
Gnatalie will spend the rest of its fossilized existence welcoming visitors, its head arcing gently toward the windows, bony face turned toward the future Lucas Museum.
The height of the hall’s doors means that the shorter a visitor is, the better their perspective. Children coming to see the green dinosaur will gasp before their parents do. Small mammals will scamper at Gnatalie’s feet again.
Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can observe only a fraction of astronomical phenomena with the naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one of them.
The latest observable meteor shower will be the Lyrids, which has been active since April 14 and is forecast to continue through April 30. The shower reaches its peak April 21 to 22, or Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.
According to NASA, the Lyrids are one of the oldest known meteor showers, and have been enjoyed by stargazers for nearly 3,000 years. Their bright, speedy streaks are caused by the dusty debris from a comet named Thatcher. They appear to spring from the constellation Lyra, which right now can be seen in the eastern sky at night in the Northern Hemisphere.
The moon will be about 27 percent full tonight, appearing as a thick crescent in the sky, according to the American Meteor Society.
To get a hint at when to best watch for the Lyrids, you can use this tool, which relies on data from the Global Meteor Network. It shows fireball activity levels in real time.
And while you gaze at the heavens, keep an eye out for other stray meteors streaking across the night sky. Skywatchers are reporting that the amount of fireballs is double what is usually seen by this point in the year.
Where meteor showers come from
There is a chance you might see a meteor on any given night, but you are most likely to catch one during a shower. Meteor showers are caused by Earth passing through the rubble trailing a comet or asteroid as it swings around the sun. This debris, which can be as small as a grain of sand, leaves behind a glowing stream of light as it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere.
Meteor showers occur around the same time every year and can last for days or weeks. But there is only a small window when each shower is at its peak, which happens when Earth reaches the densest part of the cosmic debris. The peak is the best time to look for a shower. From our point of view on Earth, the meteors will appear to come from the same point in the sky.
The Perseid meteor shower, for example, peaks in mid-August from the constellation Perseus. The Geminids, which occur every December, radiate from the constellation Gemini.
How to watch a meteor shower
Michelle Nichols, the director of public observing at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, recommends forgoing the use of telescopes or binoculars while watching a meteor shower.
“You just need your eyes and, ideally, a dark sky,” she said.
That’s because meteors can shoot across large swaths of the sky, so observing equipment can limit your field of view.
Some showers are strong enough to produce up to 100 streaks an hour, according to the American Meteor Society, though you probably won’t see that many.
“Almost everybody is under a light-polluted sky,” Ms. Nichols said. “You may think you’re under a dark sky, but in reality, even in a small town, you can have bright lights nearby.”
Planetariums, local astronomy clubs or even maps like this one can help you figure out where to go to escape excessive light. The best conditions for catching a meteor shower are a clear sky with no moon or cloud cover, sometime between midnight and sunrise. (Moonlight affects visibility in the same way as light pollution, washing out fainter sources of light in the sky.) Make sure to give your eyes at least 30 minutes to adjust to seeing in the dark.
Ms. Nichols also recommends wearing layers, even during the summer. “You’re going to be sitting there for quite a while, watching,” she said. “It’s going to get chilly, even in August.”
Bring a cup of cocoa or tea for even more warmth. Then lie back, scan the sky and enjoy the show.
Where weather is least likely to affect your view
Storm systems sweep across the country in early spring, and some will be obscuring skies tonight. But there will still be plenty of areas with clear skies, particularly in parts of the central United States.
“The best spot is going to be in the Upper Midwest,” said Rich Bann, a meteorologist with the Weather Prediction Center.
Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa will offer especially good sky-viewing weather and a beach on the Great Lakes could be a nice spot to look up at the stars.
But don’t expect to view the show from Chicago, as Illinois could see some thunderstorms. The weather will be better in the Northern and Central Plains, particularly the eastern Dakotas.
High, wispy clouds are expected over the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys and into parts of the Mid-Atlantic. But, Mr. Bann said, “you may be able to see some shooting stars through thin clouds.”
Clouds will be draped across much of the Southeast and the Northeast, though there could be some clearing in Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia. Remember, the meteors could be visible all night long. If you look outside and see clouds, try again later.
Catching the spectacle will be challenging across much of the West, particularly from Washington into Northern California, where a storm system is bringing rain and snow. That system will move east overnight.
There are likely to be some pockets of clear skies at times across southern Nevada, northwest Arizona and southwest Utah, Mr. Bann said.
Amy Graff contributed reporting.
WASHINGTON — Amid growing national security concerns, the FBI said Tuesday that it has launched a broad investigation in the deaths or disappearances of at least 10 scientists and staff connected to highly sensitive research, including four from the Los Angeles area.
“The FBI is spearheading the effort to look for connections into the missing and deceased scientists. We are working with the Department of Energy, Department of War, and with our state and state and local law enforcement partners to find answers,” the agency said in a statement.
The FBI’s announcement comes after the House Oversight Committee announced that it would investigate reports of the disappearance and deaths of the scientists, sending letters seeking information from the agencies involved in the federal inquiry as well as NASA, which owns the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, where three of the missing or dead scientists worked.
“If the reports are accurate, these deaths and disappearances may represent a grave threat to U.S. national security and to U.S. personnel with access to scientific secrets,” Reps. James Comer (R-Ky.), chairman of the committee, and Eric Burlison (R-Mo.) wrote in the letters.
President Trump told reporters last week that he had been briefed on the missing and dead scientists, which he described as “pretty serious stuff.” He said at the time that he expected answers on whether the deaths were connected “in the next week and a half.”
Michael David Hicks, who studied comets and asteroids at JPL, was the first of the scientists who disappeared or died. He died on July 30, 2023, at the age of 59. No cause of death was disclosed.
A year later, JPL physicist Frank Maiwald died at 61, with no cause of death disclosed.
Two other Los Angeles scientists are part of the string of deaths and disappearances.
On June 22, 2025, Monica Jacinto Reza, a materials scientist at JPL, disappeared while on a hike near Mt. Waterman in the San Gabriel Mountains.
On Feb. 16, Caltech astrophysicist Carl Grillmair was fatally shot on the porch of his Llano home. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department arrested Freddy Snyder, 29, in connection with the shooting. Snyder had been arrested in December on suspicion of trespassing on Grillmair’s property.
Snyder has been charged with murder.
There is no evidence at this point that the deaths and disappearances, which occurred over a span of four years, are connected.
A spokesperson for NASA, which owns JPL, said in a statement on X that the agency is “coordinating and cooperating with the relevant agencies in relation to the missing scientists.
“At this time, nothing related to NASA indicates a national security threat,” agency spokesperson Bethany Stevens wrote. “The agency is committed to transparency and will provide more information as able.”
Representatives from Caltech, which manages JPL, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The sun had barely risen over the Pacific Ocean when a small motorboat carrying a team of Indigenous artisans and Mexican biologists dropped anchor in a rocky cove near Bahías de Huatulco.
Mauro Habacuc Avendaño Luis, one of the craftsmen, was the first to wade to shore. With an agility belying his age, he struck out over the boulders exposed by low tide. Crouching on a slippery ledge pounded by surf, he reached inside a crevice between two rocks. There, lodged among the urchins, was a snail with a knobby gray shell the size of a walnut. The sight might not dazzle tourists who travel here to see humpback whales, but for Mr. Avendaño, 85, these drab little mollusks represent a way of life.
Marine snails in the genus Plicopurpura are sacred to the Mixtec people of Pinotepa de Don Luis, a small town in southwestern Oaxaca. Men like Mr. Avendaño have been sustainably “milking” them for radiant purple dye for at least 1,500 years. The color suffuses Mixtec textiles and spiritual beliefs. Called tixinda, it symbolizes fertility and death, as well as mythic ties between lunar cycles, women and the sea.
The future of these traditions — and the fate of the snails — are uncertain. The mollusks are subject to intense poaching pressure despite federal protections intended to protect them. Fishermen break them (and the other mollusks they eat) open and sell the meat to local restaurants. Tourists who comb the beaches pluck snails off the rocks and toss them aside.
A severe earthquake in 2020 thrust formerly submerged parts of their habitat above sea level, fatally tossing other mollusks in the snail’s food web to the air, and making once inaccessible places more available to poachers.
Decades ago, dense clusters of snails the size of doorknobs were easy to find, according to Mr. Avendaño. “Full of snails,” he said, sweeping a calloused, violet-stained hand across the coves. Now, most of the snails he finds are small, just over an inch, and yield only a few milliliters of dye.
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