WARSAW – Behind the glass walls of a ground-floor laboratory at Warsaw’s Copernicus Science Centre, volunteers in protective goggles lean over ancient stone, using chisels and brushes to free the bones of a giant prehistoric amphibian from the rock that has held them for millions of years.
Just beyond the transparent barrier, museum visitors follow every careful movement as work continues on the nearly six-meter, or 20-foot, skeleton. Children gesture excitedly at the oversized bones, while parents pause to imagine the powerful creature they once supported.
The slow, delicate restoration is at the heart of an uncommon public science effort. More than 2,000 volunteers are working alongside Polish scientists to prepare the skeleton of a Mastodonsaurus, a formidable aquatic predator that lived around the time the first dinosaurs were beginning to appear.
Progress comes by fractions. Using a pneumatic chisel, workers remove the surrounding rock millimeter by millimeter, while ultraviolet light helps them distinguish the fossilized bone from the stone around it.
The people doing the work are not trained paleontologists or geologists. They include managers, cleaners and tattoo artists, all of whom receive instruction and specialized protective equipment before beginning supervised two-hour chiseling shifts.
“I 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, who coordinates the volunteer teams. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around this experience.”
A giant predator from the age before dinosaurs ruled
Mastodonsaurus was among the largest amphibians known to have lived. It inhabited Earth roughly 240 million years ago, during the Middle Triassic period, when the earliest dinosaurs were emerging but had not yet become the planet’s dominant animals. The creature hunted from the water, ambushing fish and smaller amphibians.
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.
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).
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 with its restoration.
Sulej says there are no other known Mastodonsaurus skeletons this large anywhere else in the world, and 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.”
Other Mastodonsaurus skeletons have been found elsewhere, including in Germany and Russia, Sulej said, but they are around 2 to 3 meters (6½ to 10 feet) long.
A chance to reflect on the past and future
Dorota Serafin, a 51-year-old manager from Warsaw who volunteers for the project, said working with the skeleton of an ancient animal is an experience that is at the same time “relaxing and philosophical, even mystical.”
Serafin said she plans to return for other sessions and eventually bring her family to Copernicus when the restored skeleton is exhibited, which is expected to happen in October or November.
In addition to the startling experience of touching the remains of an animal that lived hundreds of millions of years ago, contact with the Mastodonsaurus offers an opportunity to reflect on the future, those involved in the project said.
The amphibian inhabited Earth’s waters after the largest known mass extinction and just before the dinosaurs appeared. As humanity contemplates the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, Sulej says the story of the Mastodonsaurus offers some hope.
“The Mastodonsaurus lived after the great extinction, which shows one thing, that nature always manages,” Sulej said. “It’s not true that humans can destroy life on this planet. Nature and life always find ways to survive.”
