he triceratops lies on its side, half-encased in rock, with its impressive nose horn and frill exposed.
Carly Burbank and Terry Ciotka have been resurrecting dinosaur skeletons for museums and private collectors around the world for decades — and since 2019 in Victoria. They’ve done Tyrannosaurus Rex and triceratops, restoring some of the most complete skeletons of those species, and collected and put together pieces of many others.
In fact, the company is one of only two in Canada — the other is Research Casting International, headquartered in Trenton, Ont. In Canada, particularly in B.C., Alberta and Ontario, private digs for significant fossils are not allowed and any discoveries have to be reported to the province. Any common surface fossils found can be kept by the finder, but can’t leave the province or be sold — and should be reported with photos and location, said Victoria Arbour, chief paleontologist at the Royal British Columbia. She said all fossils in Canada are by law property of the Crown.
Burbank, originally from Alberta, has an arts background, while Ciotka, originally from Yorkton, Sask., took a job more than two decades ago as an agent to sell dinosaur fossils at a Calgary company. He spent 14 years buying and selling fossils before the couple went out on their own, processing bones for U.S. customers, first out of their garage in Calgary and the last several years in Victoria.
“We’ve donated a lot of items to museums and make things accessible to museums, inviting them here when we get items that I think [are] of interest,” said Ciotka. “I always offer dinosaurs to museums first and I do what I can to make sure it gets there, even if I get private clients to put a dinosaur in there on private loan.Dino Lab has a triceratops recently purchased from a U.S. dino hunter by a client that, once finished, will be 21 feet long and 10 feet high.
“It was the most complete triceratops ever found,” Ciotka said of the remains unearthed in Montana. “I was there at the dig and through luck, the Melbourne museum contacted me looking for dinosaurs. It was the first dinosaur the Australian government ever purchased, and now they’ve contacted me and said that Horridus is lonely and they want me to find some friends for him.”Four massive T.
The jaw bones filled with giant teeth have already been restored, and colleagues Amanda Brownschlaigle-Miller and Dana Whitcomb are nearby, working on revealing the vertebrae sections leading up to skull. “It depends on the matrix,” she added. “The current specimen is relatively soft, so we can do it with knife work, whereas most other pieces we have to use a little air-powered jackhammer. I was working on a small piece of a triceratops and it took about two weeks of solid scribing because it was just so dense and we have to be careful.
Dino Labs takes thousands of pictures and uses time-lapse photography of each specimen to document everything.