As part of Paulton’s Park new attractions, we were asked to create a full size Plesiosaurus fossil. This was to be a little bit different to the usual fossils seen at theme parks and museums as would have a much cleaner look and not the usual brown colour.
The final product is mounted to a ply backboard so that the pieces could be mounted vertically on a wall, this is also framed with a metal finish which is in keeping with the immediate surrounding area of the theme park.
The fossil started out as a large HDU block of foam which then me modeled in-house to get the basic shape but mostly the outline of the fossil skeleton.
Once the basic shape was finalized and milled via out CNC, all of the detailing was then hand carved into the HDU any areas which we wanted to raise up we used a two part epoxy clay and sculpted the area to get the desired effect as is apparent in the below image.
As you can see above, the skull was only machined as a basic block so all the detailing and holes for the eye sockets were all taken out by hand. The spinal chord was a similar story but all of the vertical “spines” were crafted from an epoxy clay and shaped individually to get a natural flow and look the the spine. As this is a replica of a dinosaur fossil we were keep no to make this look to clinical and perfect, the look we were going for was a little worn and natural looking skeleton shape.
Once all the detail was carved in this was passed to our paint specialist who managed to work his usual magic, to give the fossil a nice slightly dirty and worn look to it, this was mostly achieved through dry brushing various colours over the base coat till it looked how we wanted it. This fossil along with all of our recent signage for the “Lost Kingdom” and Paulton’s Park are all currently on display, the scale of how large this is, is pretty hard to capture on camera so is definitely worth seeing in person.