Rare dino skeleton put on display in brewery

A brewery in Cincinnati is to display the skeleton of a rare Late Jurassic giant to support the opening of a new dinosaur gallery at the city’s museum.

The Rheingeist Brewery will display the huge fossil for a limited time from today (15 May) and at an event dubbed ‘Jurassic Geist’ to be held in its main tap room members of the public will be able to see the skeleton, talk to the palaeontologists who excavated and studied it and, of course, try a new beer that has been brewed for the occasion.

The skeleton belongs to a giant sauropod, a long-necked herbivore, known as Galeamopus, which lived during the Kimmeridgian Age of the Late Jurassic some 155 million years ago.

Complete or largely complete skeletons of this enormous 27 metre long animal, are apparently extremely rare and only three have so far been found.

The example going on display at Rheingeist was first discovered in 2000 in Montana and was then excavated over several years before being studied and put together for a further 14 years before it was deemed ready to put on display.

The creature will finally be installed, alongside other dinosaur specimens, at the Cincinnati Museum Centre’s new dinosaur gallery which is due to open this November.

Rheingeist have brewed a beer specially for the occasion called ‘Brittlebrain’, which is a reference to the species’ notoriously brittle brain casing which is also the root of its name which roughly translates from the Latin as ‘needs a helmet’.