WARSAW \u2013 Volunteers armed with chisels, brushes and protective goggles chip away at rock encasing the bones of a massive prehistoric amphibian in a glass-walled laboratory on the ground floor of Warsaw\u2019s Copernicus Science Centre.<\/p>\n
On the other side of the wall, visitors watch the work unfold on the bones of the nearly six-meter (20-foot)-long skeleton. Children point with excitement while parents contemplate the creature the massive bones once belonged to.<\/p>\n
The painstaking restoration is part of an unusual public science project. More than 2,000 volunteers are helping Polish scientists restore the skeleton of the Mastodonsaurus, a fearsome aquatic predator from around the dawn of the dinosaur age<\/a>.<\/p>\n The work is meticulous. Bone must be separated from surrounding rock millimeter by millimeter with a pneumatic chisel, whose needle gently breaks away rock while ultraviolet light reveals where the bone ends and the surrounding rock begins.<\/p>\n The volunteers are managers, cleaners, tattoo artists \u2014 not geologists or paleontologists. They receive training and special protective gear, before they begin two-hour-long chiseling sessions under supervision. <\/p>\n \u201cI imagine that those bones were lying underground for 240 million years and I am the first human on earth to touch them,” said Tatyana Kozyk, the coordinator of the volunteer teams. \u201cI’m still trying to wrap my head around this experience.\u201d<\/p>\n An ancient aquatic predator<\/p>\n One of the largest amphibians ever to exist, the Mastodonsaurus lived about 240 million years ago during the Middle Triassic, while the earliest dinosaurs were appearing but before they came to dominate Earth. It was an underwater ambush hunter, preying mainly on fish and smaller amphibians.<\/p>\n Scientists believe it could grow to nearly six meters (20 feet) in length. It had a broad, flat head, long jaws and sharp conical teeth, its appearance resembling a crocodile’s, though it belonged to a different branch of the vertebrate family tree.<\/p>\n When the restoration is complete, it will be the largest exhibited in a museum anywhere in the world, said Tomasz Sulej, a paleontologist and professor at the Institute of Paleobiology at the Polish Academy of Sciences. Its skeleton weighs 1,300 kilograms (2,865 pounds).<\/p>\n