The USU Prehistoric Museum is excited to be hosting an Opening Reception on June 16 from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm for their newest Special Exhibit: Dippy – The World’s Oldest Celebrity. Castle Country Radio was able to sit down with Head of Exhibits, Christopher Henderson to get all the details.

“It was a find on a dig by Andrew Carnegie, who was early American industrialist, was the richest man in the world. But also committed to give his entire fortune away, he had written that, the man who dies rich, dies disgraced. So that was his mission to better use his wealth to benefit mankind. One of the ways he did that was by establishing culture institutions, like museums, schools and libraries. Part of his museum initiative meant searching for large dinosaurs and that was a common thing in those times,” said Henderson. The Diplodocus is a sauropod dinosaur, it’s a long neck dinosaur. At the time, it was a race to see who could mount the sauropod dinosaur between Carnegie Museum and American Museum of Natural History.

“So after this dinosaur was discovered Carnegie and William J. Holland, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History hatched this plan to cast the original fossil bones and reproduce the skeleton in plaster and then gift those plaster casts to anyone in the world, who any head of state all over the world who requested one personally from Andrew Carnegie,” said Henderson. So there were ten original casts made in plaster and now those stand all over the world from Europe to Latin America and here in America.

The Opening Reception on June 16 will give guests the opportunity to see this Diplodocus, better known as Dippy and to voice their opinion on where Dippy should be mounted as the museum now has Dippy in concrete. They received Dippy back in 2013 but there was some damage to the structure so a grant was applied for and awarded to repair the damaged bones so that Dippy could eventually be mounted outdoors in Carbon County. “It has been sitting in our collections for the past 10 years, awaiting a chance to be mounted somewhere, its takes money, it takes buy-in from the community, it takes initiative, and people pushing it through to make this happen. We figured the best way to do that would be to bring that cast up out of our collections, put it on display, tell this incredible story, and hopefully get people excited about putting it up somewhere here in Carbon County,” stated Henderson.

For more information on the Opening Reception for the Special Exhibit: Dippy – The World’s Oldest Celebrity please call the museum at (435) 613-5060.