Meet Gnatalie: Paleontologist discusses preparing potential new dinosaur species for display

If the prospect of seeing a potential new dinosaur species with your own eyes excites you, a trip to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM) might be in order Nov. 17.

That's when Gnatalie, believed to belong to a previously undiscovered herbivore species of long-neck dinosaurs, goes on display. Discovered in Utah in 2007, the dinosaur is a composite mount of multiple fossil specimens. The effort was led by paleontologist Luis M. Chiappe, the head of NHM's research and collections department.

Gnatalie will also be the only green-colored dinosaur on display in the world, due to her bones absorbing minerals where the fossils were found. Visitors will also be able to see Gnatalie for free at NHM Commons, which is the museum's new wing and community hub.

ABC News' Juju Chang spoke with paleontologist Nate Smith about how Gnatalie was discovered, the journey of piecing the 150-million-year-old giant back together, and recent controversies in the world of dinosaur fossils.

ABC NEWS: So what is 75 feet long, green and older than a T-Rex? Well, meet Gnatalie, believed to be a whole new species of dinosaur. Scientists have spent the past decade painstakingly putting this 150 million-year-old giant back together. And National Geographic cameras documented the entire process.

CHIAPPE: Well, this is a 150 million-year-old dinosaur, right? So I think you expect not to be in perfect shape. And it isn't. If you look at some of the tail vertebrae here, you're going to see that some of the spines are a little twisted. They're a little broken, they're somewhat deformed.

ABC NEWS: Wow. And I'm joined now by Dr. Nate Smith. He's the director of the Dinosaur Institute at the LA Natural History Museum, where Gnatalie will soon be on display. Dr. Smith, thanks for joining us.

SMITH: Thank you for having me.

ABC NEWS: I love that you're living the dream because every kid dreams of being a paleontologist. Here you are studying dinosaurs. But let's start with her color. Why is she green?

SMITH: Yeah, the color comes from a lot of the mineralogy, and those are much more common. What makes Gnatalie that green color is a mineral called celadonite, which got concentrated kind of after it was originally fossilized. And that mineral replaced some of the minerals that were already there.

ABC NEWS: And she was found in the Badlands, right, of Utah?

SMITH: Yeah. So the southeast corner of Utah, near a town, a tiny little town called Bluff – a really scenic and beautiful part of the United States.

ABC NEWS: And this is like breaking news in the world of dinosaurs. You're calling this a whole-new species. Tell us more about that.

SMITH: Right. So some of our researchers are in the process of working that up right now. That kind of takes time, when you're going to erect and name a new species. But it looks like nothing kind of quite fit with the previously described large, long-necked sauropods from this area. And it kind of is what we might call an in-betweener from a couple of other species. So that's made the find even more exciting.

ABC News: Take us through the process of excavation to creating this exhibit.

SMITH: Yeah, it's a colossal task, as you can imagine. And in some ways, the funnest part of it is the easiest – you know, finding and starting to excavate those bones. But we give a lot of credit to our technicians and prepare our staff here at the Dinosaur Institute and the NHM, because it takes hundreds and thousands of hours to actually excavate these bones from the surrounding rock or matrix. And that's really the limiting factor for us to bring these giants back to life.

ABC NEWS: And I envision you in an Indiana Jones hat out there, excavating away. And I understand that Gnatalie will go on display this fall. And you had folks vote on her name, and she is Gnat-alie for a reason.

SMITH: That's right. It's Gnatalie with a G. And that's a shout-out to in the early days of the work at this quarry, the field crew was just relentlessly pestered by flying gnats and biting gnats.

ABC NEWS: Once she goes on display, what will visitors to your august museum get to do when they see the new exhibit?

SMITH: Well, Gnatalie is very much a community dinosaur, right? It was excavated by a community of folks over, you know, more than a dozen years, including students, volunteers, researchers from around the world. It's from BLM (Bureau of Land Management) land, so it kind of belongs to the community. And it'll be part of a new display in our new NHM commons community center. So everyone will be able to come and see Gnatalie for free and learn the story about basically what we call a ground-to-mound – so everything that took place from finding, excavating, preparing, studying, and then ultimately putting on display this giant dinosaur.

ABC NEWS: There's another dinosaur fossil that will not be on public display because recently Apex, the largest stegosaurus ever found, was sold to a private collector for nearly $45 million. So how do you feel about these rare specimens being out of public view and out of reach for researchers?

SMITH: It's a challenge and there's a lot of controversy and debate over it. One of the things a lot of us in the paleontological community are hopeful for is that the bidder that purchased Apex has a long history of working with natural history museums and putting those specimens on display and doing a lot of paleontological and museum educational outreach. So our hope is that Apex won't be lost forever to the public and to researchers.

ABC NEWS: And, of course, we all hope that everyone will swarm to go see Gnatalie. Thank you, Dr. Smith, so much for joining us.

SMITH: Thank you for your time. And we're looking forward to having everybody out here in the fall.

ABC NEWS: And we know that Gnatalie will make her public debut at the LA Natural History Museum this November. Thanks again.

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