More than 2,000 volunteers are helping Polish scientists restore the skeleton of a Mastodonsaurus at Warsaw’s Copernicus Science Center, where a glass-walled laboratory turns unpaid labor into public spectacle and institutional prestige. The fossil, unearthed in southern Poland in 2023, is the first Mastodonsaurus skeleton to be found in such a well-preserved, nearly complete state, according to the Copernicus Science Center.
Who Does the Work
Volunteers armed with chisels, brushes and protective goggles are chipping away at rock encasing the bones on the ground floor of the center. Visitors watch the work unfold on the nearly six-meter, or 20-foot, skeleton. Children point with excitement while parents look on. The scene has the polished feel of a museum display, but the labor underneath it is slow, physical and exacting. Bone is 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.
The volunteers are managers, cleaners and tattoo artists, not geologists or paleontologists. They receive training and special protective gear before they begin two-hour chiseling sessions under supervision. That arrangement says plenty about who gets to direct the project and who gets handed the tools. Tatyana Kozyk, the coordinator of the volunteer teams, said, “I imagine that those bones were lying underground for 240 million years and I am the first human on earth to touch them.” She added, “I’m still trying to wrap my head around this experience.”
Who Gets the Credit
Tomasz Sulej, a paleontologist and professor at the Institute of Paleobiology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said the restored skeleton will be the largest exhibited in a museum anywhere in the world when it is complete. He said the skeleton weighs 1,300 kilograms, or 2,865 pounds. Sulej and his colleague Wojciech Pawlak from the Faculty of Geology at the Warsaw University are credited with discovering the skeleton in southern Poland in 2023 and coming up with the idea to invite volunteers to help restore it.
That invitation brought in a crowd of ordinary people to do the painstaking work, while the institutions and named experts remain the ones attached to the discovery, the authority, and the final display. The arrangement is tidy. The labor is dispersed. The prestige stays centralized.
Sulej said there are no other known Mastodonsaurus skeletons this large anywhere else in the world, and that the discovery promises to help scientists learn more about the species. “The structure of the body is different from what we knew so far,” he said. “This is information that is completely new to the scientific world.” He said other Mastodonsaurus skeletons have been found in Germany and Russia, but they are around 2 to 3 meters, or 6½ to 10 feet, long.
What the Public Sees
The Copernicus Science Center has turned the restoration into something visitors can watch in real time. The work sits behind glass, visible to the public, with the nearly six-meter skeleton stretched out like an exhibit before it’s even finished. The center says the restored skeleton is expected to be exhibited in October or November.
Dorota Serafin, a 51-year-old manager from Warsaw who volunteers for the project, said working with the skeleton of an ancient animal is “relaxing and philosophical, even mystical.” She said she plans to return for other sessions and eventually bring her family to Copernicus when the restored skeleton is exhibited. That’s the human side of the project: people giving their time, their hands, and their attention to a fossil that will end up under institutional control.
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. Scientists believe it could grow to nearly six meters, or 20 feet, in length, and it had a broad, flat head, long jaws and sharp conical teeth, resembling a crocodile though it belonged to a different branch of the vertebrate family tree.
Sulej said the story of the Mastodonsaurus offers hope as humanity contemplates the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. “The Mastodonsaurus lived after the great extinction, which shows one thing, that nature always manages,” he said. “It’s not true that humans can destroy life on this planet. Nature and life always find ways to survive.” The fossil may be ancient, but the setup around it is very current: institutions organize, volunteers labor, and the public is invited to admire the result from behind glass.