Animated dinosaur eggs courtesy of Brian Cooley
Text adapted from the National Geographic Society
After graduation from the Alberta College of Art in 1979, Brian Cooley’s first job was building a fake volcano for a prehistoric park at the Calgary zoo. While on the job he was visited by an exhibit designer from Vancouver seeking someone to make a dinosaur. “It seemed like a great idea,” says Cooley. Moreover, the job involved close collaboration with the paleontologists at the Provincial Museum in Edmonton. “When I met Dr. Philip Currie [then at Edmonton], and other members of the staff and heard about their discoveries and the new theories about warm-bloodedness, herding, and hunting in packs, I was tremendously excited,” Cooley remembers. “My wife, Mary Ann Wilson, and I developed a model of Albertosaurus to their specifications, and it was such a mutually rewarding experience that we began working with them to create the life-size, fleshed-out dinosaur sculptures that would become part of the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta".
Images (animated) courtesy of Brian Cooley and the National Geographic Society
