I recently finished building these two at work and thought I’d share them here. They’re resin castings of Ichthyornis, from a fossil dug up in western Kansas. My employer’s website says the molds were made from the most complete Ichthyornis skeleton ever found. It measures about 8 inches long. The website says these birds were probably similar to modern seagulls, except of course that gulls (like all other birds today) don’t have teeth.

To be honest, it would have been easier to build these things out of matchsticks. The molds were tiny, the castings difficult to trim and assemble. Plus, I’m a poor welder and so I had a hard time making the bases look decent.

Both are on their way to a new home at a museum in Korea.

Last summer, my wife was driving through Woodland Park, Colo., which is the city nearest where we live. Truthfully, calling Woodland Park a “city” may seem like too much because it’s a small place, but it does have several grocery stores, a Taco Bell and McDonald’s … and a dinosaur museum.

Yep, a dinosaur museum. I got my first look inside the place about a year ago and was amazed by all the dinos on display, and even more amazed to realize that all those beasties were molded, cast and built right there, on the premises. I spent as many minutes as I could spare staring through the display window into the attached lab, marveling at all I could see.

Anyway, what my wife saw as she drove by was a notice that the lab was hiring a molder/caster.

The croc on the right will be on permanent display at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum. The other is part of a traveling exhibit.

I happened to have a little experience molding and casting, having recently finished molding the Dedham Pond Mr. Hyde and casting all kinds of Phantom replacement heads. I threw a few castings in a sack and headed out the next day to apply for the job. Two days later, I had been hired.

Skip to the end of December. After weeks primarily spent molding and casting dinosaur teeth and claws, interspersed with molding some more complicated things and casting a baryonyx, I was assigned to help build a crocodile. Specifically, Terminonaris, an extinct crocodilian, in cooperation with the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada.

The project took about three months, with two of us working on it full time, plus lots of help from others in the lab.

We started by making castings from research molds of the croc, which were slightly crushed. From there, we cut up bones, resculpted, filled in missing parts, etc. Once we’d reconstructed the skeletal parts, we molded them and made new castings. My boss did the bulk of the work reconstructing the skull; I did a lot of the detailing and positioned the teeth.

We built two crocodiles in poses selected by RSM. One of the crocs is supposed to look like it’s swimming (that’s the one I helped build), the other is standing. After they were all together, we painted them. I did most of the painting; the deadline was close so I had to finish them both in about 12 hours. We also detailed and painted a third set of castings but didn’t assemble those. Each croc is about 19 feet long.

I started with this photo from Wikipedia, of the house shown in the background of Grant Wood’s famous “American Gothic” painting:

I wanted to turn this into a haunted house, using characters from some silent scream classics. Here’s what I came up with:

For those unfamiliar with them, the characters are Lon Chaney as the man in the beaver hat from “London After Midnight”, at left; Charles Ogle as the monster in Thomas Edison’s “Frankenstein”, in the lower window; Conrad Veidt as Cesare and Lil Dagover as Jane in “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, right; and Max Schreck as Graf Orlok in “Nosferatu”, top window.

The stupidest dream has entertained me for the last week or so. I imagine that my 3-week-old daughter can talk, and we have this conversation:

“Father,” she says courteously in a melodious voice, “I fear I have grown hungry again. Would you please ask Mother if she wouldn’t mind nursing me awhile? I’d approach her myself, but not being able to crawl and all, it might take me some time to catch up to her.”

“I’d be delighted,” I answer. “However, your mother is preoccupied with her daily shower just now. Might you wait a few minutes for her to finish?”

“Oh, no trouble at all,” she says. “In fact, I hate to be such a bother to begin with. Please don’t interrupt Mother until she’s dried her hair and eaten brunch.”

“Thank you. In the meantime, could you use a fresh diaper?”

“Well, I’m embarrassed to confess it, but as long as you’re asking, I COULD do with a fresh Huggie. Do you have time to accommodate me?”

“No trouble,” I answer.

We both smile as the dream ends, and then I wonder why I am now pleased with the “talking baby” fantasy I find so irritating in movies or commercials.

It probably has something to do with the way many of my real-world interactions with my new daughter go.

“WAAAAH! WAAAAH! HIC! WAAAAAAAH!”

“- Lisa! -“

“WAAAAAAAH! GULP! WA WA WA WAAAAAAAAH!”

“- get AWAY from me, Effie -” (Directed to our dog, whose sensitive ears probably jangle much more than mine when the baby cries.)

“WEEEEAAAAAAAH!”

Geez. Holding a baked potato fresh off a 500-degree grill is less challenging than struggling with a shrieking infant in your arms.

A baby won’t be reasoned with or tolerate a delay while you wash your hands. Once she’s started crying because she’s hungry or because she needs her diaper changed or because she needs to burp or because whatever (good luck figuring it out), she won’t let up until two minutes after she gets it.

When I told my wife it baffled me that the little ones who need us so much make a noise that drives us crazy, Lisa said they do it so we’ll put food in their mouths as quickly as possible in order to quiet them down.

How awful is it that this is what I have to say about the new little miracle in our family?

I’ve been a father close to six years, which means I still have plenty to learn about parenting (who doesn’t?). One thing I know for sure about myself, at least, is that the kids have exasperated me most when they’re smallest.

This probably doesn’t say much good about me, especially when one considers all the extra demands motherhood has piled on my wife.

When was the last time Lisa got a full night’s uninterrupted sleep? A full night without having to deal with some kind of issue with one of our daughters?

Years. No kidding.

Fortunately, our baby isn’t always crying. Sometimes she sleeps.

And sometimes she’s just neat, which reminds me of all the things I like about kids. Sometimes she sits quietly in someone’s lap and looks around. The lamps, the trees, the furniture, her big sisters … it’s all new to her and she’s curious about it. That’s fun.

Sometimes she shows us she’s already learning, such as when she recently reached up to take hold of a bottle while she was being fed.

And sometimes, already, I look at her and know I don’t get to keep her forever.

Please, do me a favor. If you’re reading these words on a page spread out on some public restroom floor, pick it up and take it with you when you’re finished.

If you’re not interested in keeping the paper and there’s no recycle bin handy, then go ahead throw it in the trash.

Want to get my goat? Don’t bother telling me you’re going to line a birdcage with my column because I’m delighted to think my mug might be smiling under thousands of seed-stuffed parakeets. That’s a spectacular use of newsprint.

I keep a stack of old newspapers near my workbench and spatter them with paints and glues while working on model kits. Newspapers have caught the cast-off pieces of dozens of my daughters’ art projects. I’ve seen sheets of newspaper being used to protect just about every conceivable surface while work is being done nearby.

Saving carpets and tables from stains … perhaps that’s not noble, but it’s definitely handy. For only a couple of coins, anyone can have a decent-sized roll of flexible, mess-absorbing paper. What a bargain!

Plenty of experts think newspapers will have to evolve into Internet-based entities if they want to thrive in the 21st century and maybe that’s true, but if it is, I suspect a lot of things are going to get messed up in the future for lack of something to cover them with.

No, if you want to bug me, don’t do it by pointing out one beneficial alternative use for the product to which I’ve dedicated my professional life so far. It’s a good thing people turn to newspapers to prevent some nasty messes.

If you want to bug me, use the paper to make the nasty messes. Throw them in the back of your pickup and let them scatter when you drive, perhaps, or just decide they’re too cheap to bother toting around and leave them wherever you are.

Which brings me back to the floors of those public restrooms, fondly known by many as “reading rooms.” You might be in one this very moment, looking at my column because it was facing up on the page when the previous user dropped it.

I think people in general try to be basically polite to one another, so I don’t know what could inspire so many of us to just drop things for someone else to pick up later.

Even if it doesn’t come naturally, I’m sure most of us heard from someone when we were growing up that we should clean up after ourselves. My mother is the one who said it most to me.

Perhaps some of us consider it a courtesy of sorts to the next visitor to leave a newspaper spread out on the floor, but I suspect such people have never been in the position themselves of cleaning up after others. They’ve also probably never heard the sigh or seen the head shake of the custodian who has to pick up all those newspapers at day’s end.

I’ve heard that sigh, though, and seen that head shake, and felt pretty bad about only watching as a tired fellow stooped to pick up all those papers on the floor and deposited them in the trash – which was only a few feet away. The next day, and every day since, more papers covered the floor.

More than one of the jobs I’ve held put me in the position of actually being the person who sighed and shook his head. My bosses and I both thought I had better things to do than clean up messes that were made not because they had to be made or because of some accident, but because someone simply felt like making them. But it was me or nobody … and “nobody” is pretty much how I figured I was regarded by the people who put me in that position.

Standing in the delivery room, with a neat bunch of people sewing my wife back together behind me, I watched another neat person checking out my baby girl. Quietly, I did the same thing I’d done with my previous two girls when they were newborns: Counted fingers and toes.

Hands are more important to me, so I started with them. Right – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Left – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Good so far, on to the feet. Right – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Left – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

All there, I reported to Lisa a couple minutes later. Our baby has all her parts, and judging by the crying, her lungs are healthy as well.

That, I figure, is as good a way to start things with a new family member as you’re going to get.

In fact, the whole day went about as well as it could, particularly considering how nervous Lisa and I were when we started it a few hours earlier.

Our baby had to be delivered by Caesarean section. We’d known for eight months this would be the case; for different reasons, our first two girls were C-section babies, so the third one would have to be as well. Naturally, even though she’d been through it before, the prospect of being opened up and having the baby pulled out didn’t appeal to Lisa, and I didn’t care for it either.

So, we got out of bed early and made brave faces while we traveled to St. Mary’s Hospital. The day I saw in front of me was one in which I figured the best I could do was not make a jerk of myself.

Lisa would spend the morning getting through surgery, then she’d spend the afternoon in pain, stuck in a strange bed with all kinds of tapes and tubes attached to her, and she’d have to do the most important beginning steps of parenting – feeding the baby.

My biggest problems would be getting a couple hours’ less sleep than I wanted and dealing with that disgusting first No. 2 diaper.

I hope that at 7:30 a.m. I was prepared to put on a reassuring face while at the same time standing up for my wife if she needed me … but I never had to find out. Things went well, and there are so many people to thank that I can’t possibly do it here. I won’t bring up names here, either, partially because I didn’t catch them all (disgraceful, I know), but more because I didn’t actually tell any of them I might write about them later.

First, the nurse who got Lisa ready for surgery threw me off guard by telling me she’d met my parents. I assumed she was wrong because my folks live 300 miles away … but she wasn’t. They’d stopped at her house when they were visiting about a year ago and bought peaches from her. Amazing.

The aforementioned neat group of people who did the surgery were the ones we feared most, and I can’t describe how many ways they made it go well. I half suspect the midwife, who has been Lisa’s primary caregiver through all three pregnancies, warned everyone about us.

The high point of the C-section was when the anesthesiologist helped Lisa hold up a mirror so she could watch our baby being delivered. Despite all she was going through, Lisa was thrilled. I wanted to look myself, but feared the blood would inspire me to make a spectacle of myself, so I stayed where I was.

During the rest of our hospital stay, we encountered many more people who humbled me by doing their jobs so well. Not only did they keep an eye on my wife and baby, but also on me, the least important person in the room.

One generous woman even put together a gift pack of hospital doodads for my older girls and made their day even better.