September 22, 2016:

by Mary O’Leary

Absent for the past two years, a prehistoric creature is back again to greet the thousands of motorists who pass through New Haven daily on Interstate 95 over the Quinnipiac River.

This time it is not a 1940s understanding of dinosaurs that will be visible, but an up-to-date single shot of a Deinonychus, feathers and all.

Described as an “agile predator,” which likely traveled in packs and stood some 5 feet tall, this creature is the newest to be featured on a Magellan Midstream Partners oil tank in New Haven.

Designed by artist Bayla Arietta, the detailed drawing of a Deinonychus will again carry the legend “Yale Peabody Museum ... A New Haven Treasure.”

At Tuesday’s unveiling, guests watched Merritt Graphics workers put portions of the 72-foot-by-36-foot mural in place, a process that should be finished by Thursday.

In 1997, a detail of Rudolph Zallinger’s “The Age of Reptiles” was displayed on an oil tank on property then owned by Wyatt Energy.

Magellan took over in 2000 and removed the mural in 2014 to perform tank coating maintenance.

Shortly after it was painted over, Peabody and Magellan officials said Tuesday, conversations began about replacing the copy of the iconic mural, which took Zallinger almost five years to complete.

The original fresco remains in the Great Hall at the Peabody Museum of Natural History and traces more than 300 million years of Earth’s history, ending some 65 million years ago.

Arietta, 26, presented a painting of a Deinonychus on a contract with the Peabody, which later settled on the image as the focus of the new mural.

Peabody Director David Skelly said they saw the mural as an opportunity to show a 2016 concept of what a dinosaur looks like.

“It is safe to say that this is the most prominent piece of public art in New Haven. Hundreds of thousands of people are regularly going to see this from the highway,” Skelly said.

He said it is clear now that many of the meat-eating dinosaurs, such as Deinonychus, were feathered.

Skelly said the “Jurassic Park” movies have shied away from depicting this for two reasons.

The director said it is very difficult to model feathers on the computer graphics the films use, and, by now, the franchise has a specific image of the raptors that people associate with the films.

Deinonychus is the species that inspired the raptors in “Jurassic Park,” Skelly said.

John Ostrom, the Peabody’s curator of paleontology, discovered this species in the badlands of Montana in 1964.

Skelly said Michael Crichton, the author of the book, “Jurassic Park,” spent time with Ostrom more than 30 years ago when he was researching his 1990 novel, which was then the basis for the movies.

Deinonychus itself is kind of a star as it prompted what paleontologists refer to as the Dinosaur Renaissance that changed perceptions of the creatures.

“This animal, its body shape, its size, that big claw it has on its foot, spoke of a species that was highly active, probably highly intelligent. ... At the time, people thought dinosaurs were slow, cumbersome, barely able to hold their body weight up,” Skelly said.

The director said the Peabody Museum is kind of an icon for New Haven, while this species is an icon for prehistoric life.

Matthew Nemerson, the city’s economic development director, said New Haven is always reinventing itself, playing on the morphing image of a dinosaur from a lizard to a bird.

Historically, he said the oldest train line in the state is across the way and where the tank farm is today was the beginning of New Haven as a logistics center in the mid-19th century.

Skelly said Magellan, which spent $50,000 on the project, did not have to do this and they are grateful for this corporate investment in the city.

Bruce Heine, director of government and media affairs for Magellan, said the mural is attached to a 90,000 barrel heating oil tank, the first tank that was built at the New Haven Harbor site in 1937, part of one million barrels of storage there.

With two other facilities in New Haven, Magellan has a capacity of 4 million barrels in the city.

Heine said the first mural lasted 17 years and they hope this new version will last longer than that.

Arietta just moved to New Haven last month with her husband, Adam Andis, as he begins a doctorate in amphibian ecology at the School of Forestry and Environmental Science.

She was excited to see the mural full-scale.

“They got this really amazing scan that they were able to blow up this big that would keep all the definition,” Arietta said. She worked in Montana and Alaska before coming here and got her training as an illustrator at the Hartford Art School.

The mural is a high performance 3M graphic film and lamination combination, said Pat Freer, vice president of the big color division of Merritt Graphics, part of the Joseph Merritt Co. on Hamilton Street. “It is meant for permanent installation projects,” he said.

The company created 54-inch panels to be installed one at a time.

Skelly said the Peabody has one “little quibble” with Crichton, who wasn’t wild about the name Deinonychus, so he used a relative’s name, a Velociraptor, instead in his novel.

Skelly set the record straight on Velociraptor, which sounds tough, but was really “a not formidable thing” only some two feet tall.

“Deinonychus is the real deal,” Skelly said.

http://www.nhregister.com/general-news/20160913/blast-from-the-past-dinosaur-mural-going-back-up-on-oil-storage-tank-at-new-haven-harbor