Two weeks ago, a crew closed part of West Jones Street and took windows out of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences to move a 5,000-pound block of sandstone and plaster inside. Inside the block is a 75-million-year-old dinosaur that museum scientists think could be a species nobody has named yet. Preparing it is expected to take a couple of years, and all of that work will happen in the SECU DinoLab, which is free and in full view of anyone who walks in.
That changes how the lab works for people who live nearby. What's on view will change as the team works, and the first stretch, while most of the skeleton is still in its jacket, only happens once.
Right now the exhibit is a plaster block
The fossil arrived on Wednesday, Oct. 21. The city closed West Jones Street between Wilmington and Salisbury streets from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. so the museum could move it in. According to Axios Raleigh, the bones are still encased in sandstone and protective white plaster.
So a visit this month mostly shows you a big white jacket and the people starting to open it. Paleontologists will take the rock off bit by bit over many months, and anyone who sees the block today has something to compare against when the bones start showing.
Lab manager Eric Lund told Axios how the team realized what they had. Weathering had uncovered a few bones, and "we just kept finding more and more, and realized that we had the whole thing."
Why a whole skeleton matters for this one
The animal is an ornithomimid, one of a group of fast-running theropods with beaks and no teeth. It was roughly 8 to 10 feet long in life. Lindsay Zanno, the museum's head of paleontology, described it to WRAL as "a very fast-running animal with a toothless beak and feathers," one that "would've looked a lot like the kind of birds you see here today." Axios put it more simply: a runner, not a flyer.
It comes from the Kaiparowits Formation in southern Utah. Paleontologists from the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Utah dug it out of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument together. The museum calls it the first substantially complete skeleton of its kind found in that region.
Up to now, science only had scattered pieces of this kind of animal from that rock formation. "We have known this type of dinosaur to be in this formation, but really just parts of the animal: a piece of foot, some vertebrae, some ribs… This is the first time that we've had the whole thing," Lund told Axios Raleigh.
A complete skeleton is the thing that could turn this fossil into a holotype, the specimen used to formally describe a new species. Kerry Irish, the museum's communications director, explained that to Axios. If the team confirms it, the defining example of a new dinosaur will have been cleaned and studied a block from the State Capitol. Zanno told WRAL that this kind of discovery is more common than people think: "There's something like 50 dinosaurs named every year."
"The SECU DinoLab was built around a powerful idea: the public shouldn't have to wait until the science is finished to be part of discovery." Denise Young, director of the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, in the museum's Oct. 27 announcement
The lab has done this before
Raleigh has seen how this plays out once already. The museum says the Dueling Dinosaurs fossils, a Triceratops named Murphy and a tyrannosaur named Manteo, have been on display in the SECU DinoLab since April 2024. Visitors watched that work go on for more than a year, and then it produced a worldwide headline.
In October 2025, Zanno and James Napoli published a study in Nature showing that the Dueling Dinosaurs tyrannosaur is a mature Nanotyrannus lancensis and not a juvenile T. rex. According to the museum, growth and anatomical evidence put the animal at about 20 years old. The same team also named a second species, N. lethaeus. After the finding, the museum updated the exhibit to match. Zanno received the 2026 North Carolina Award, the state's highest civilian honor.
The museum calls the ornithomimid the first major fossil to enter the lab since the Dueling Dinosaurs. So for now, the room shows two stages side by side. Murphy and Manteo are a project whose big result has already been published. The new block is a project that's just starting. If you go back a few times over the next two years, you'll see the second one move toward the first.
A November plan built around the lab
The DinoLab is at 11 W. Jones St. It's open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free. The museum's November calendar has several events this month that make a good reason to drop by the lab:
- Friday, Nov. 6: Museum Movie Night, Jurassic Park. From 5:30 to 7 p.m. there's live music, science stations, and food and drinks for sale. The movie starts at 7 p.m. in the WRAL 3D Theater. Afterward there's trivia and a Q&A with Dr. Jennifer Anné, assistant manager of the SECU DinoLab. Tickets are $5, or $3 for museum members, and the film is rated PG-13. It's a chance to ask someone from the lab about cloned dinosaurs a little over two weeks after a possible new species came in through the museum's windows.
- Saturday, Nov. 7: Astronomy & Astrophysics Research Day. Talks and activities at the Nature Research Center, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
- Sunday, Nov. 8: Dueling Dinosaurs Sensory Friendly Mornings. From 10 a.m. to noon, with less noise and smaller crowds, plus a chance to talk with the DinoLab research team. Registration is free and not required.
- Thursday, Nov. 12: Walk Through the Seasons at Prairie Ridge. From 10 a.m. to noon at the museum's Prairie Ridge site. Advance registration is required.
The full November calendar also lists recurring animal feedings, Incredible Science, storytimes and ICONS tours. General admission to the museum is free, but some programs sell their own tickets, so check each event page before you go.
The Nov. 8 morning is the quietest time listed this month, and the DinoLab research team will be on hand to answer questions.
What a visit next spring will show
Taking out-of-town guests to the DinoLab next spring will show them something you couldn't have seen this fall, because the team will have taken more rock off the skeleton by then. It's worth taking a photo of the block on your first visit so you can compare.
The museum hasn't given a completion date, only WRAL's estimate of "the next couple of years." If the ornithomimid is confirmed as a new species, the specimen that defines it will have been prepared in public on West Jones Street, and anyone who went to the lab got to watch.
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