Prehistoric road trip

Leonardo is a unique specimen- a dinosaur that’s more than just a pile of bones! Fossilized skin still covers most of his body. After his death, the body dried out and mummified, and then slowly over time the mummy fossilized.

For a 77 million year old relic, Leonardo has survived almost intact. Over the last year,Lansmont had the opportunity to work with the Leonardo Project alongside paleontologists, packaging pros Sealed Air and test design experts ISTA. The Leonardo Project is setup like CSI (crime scene investigation) for the dinosaur world. Paleontologists are busy reconstructing how he lived, what he ate, his age, cause of death, etc. They even wanted to see inside his body with hopes that impressions of soft tissue might have survived. Clearly they couldn’t destroy the fossil by chipping away the skin to get inside. They needed a “super” scanner that was large enough to accommodate the stone block, and powerful enough to see through it. A national search led to a NASA facility near Houston, Texas. Think of the possibilities – a firsthand look inside a real dinosaur.

The Journey

Leonardo would need to journey from his home in northern Montana to south Texas. How do you safely move a big, heavy, one of a kind, irreplaceable object - 2098 miles - and guarantee that it doesn’t get damaged? Lansmont followed the transport packaging fundamentals: measure the environment, design and test your protection system and monitor its performance during shipment. What lies ahead?

Before protection for a trip like this can be designed, you need to understand the vibration and dynamic inputs that can occur. Once identified, then a system can be engineered to mitigate the effects. To assess the transportation severity conditions, a “dry run” shipment was instrumented with Lansmont SAVER™ X series field data recorders. The exact vehicle and driver that would ultimately transport Leonardo were pressed into service hauling a “simulated load” in order to quantify the vehicle dynamics.

Putting knowledge to the test

Data from the “dry run” was pored over, pondered, and analyzed, ultimately culminating in a test specification and design goal which Armstrong’s team could use to develop the protection system. When it came time to make the trip for real, Lansmont monitored both the truck and the crate in which Leonardo rode. The instruments could feel how the truck moved, and how Leonardo responded to that input. This allowed us to verify that vehicle dynamics had not changed since the “dry run” and to ensure continuity with the original design goal. It also allowed us to observe the performance of the protection system in action. SaverXware™ has been used to produce 3D tours of the spatially aware data recorded during the trip for display with Google Earth.

Conclusion

The instruments detected the movements of the truck and how Leonardo responded to that input . . . and allowed us to observe the performance of the protection system in action.

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