The Making of a Dinosaur

By now, you’d think everyone in South Jersey knows about, and can recognize, . For that, thanks go to several groups, especially the Haddonfield Garden Club and John Giannotti, an artist and sculptor who donated his talent and time to design and create the critter.

Seemingly climbing through a bed of large river rocks, Haddie even had Lantern Lane renamed in her honor soon after she was installed with great fanfare in 2003.

Giannotti recently talked about the process that went into the sculpture during an afternoon meeting of the Haddon Fortnightly. Living in Haddonfield, on West End Avenue, Giannotti said he was so proud of his town that he wanted to use his skills to put a recognizable “face” on the duck bill dinosaur.

No, it wasn’t named after the town where the first known fossils of the beast were recovered in 1838. Hadrosaurus is the name of the genus that includes the vegetarian beast.

Giannotti, former chairman of Rutgers University’s Fine Arts Department, did more than donate his labor. He encouraged elementary school students to visit him in his barn turned studio to plop a handful of clay onto the model. The clay then was worked into the texture of the skin of the model.

The group Haddonfield Acts to Create Haddrosaurus foulkii (HATCH) raised the $54,000 needed to complete the statue. Giannotti said the market price at the time would have been about $150,000 if he billed for his work.

“I wanted to make a model as large as possible for its space,” he said and the relied on the only true bones of the dinosaur, discovered in a marl pit at the foot of Maple Avenue in 1858. “We didn’t have much, just 47 bones and just one cheek bone from the head,” he said. Pieces of a femur, a calf bone, some toes, and bits of a tail help define the size of the dinosaur.

“There had been some bones found in England, but no one knew what it was. They thought it might be a hippopotamus and there were some leg sockets that indicated how it stood,” he said.

Six hundred local children, from kindergarten through fifth grade, visited the studio as Giannotti worked. Many wrote him follow-up notes, which he has kept, and drew pictures of what they thought the animal would look like.

In addition to the school children, he said, guests visiting Giannotti and his wife, Antoinette–who grew up in town–smacked plastiline onto the work. A bridal party once visited the studio, and the bride and groom climbed on Haddie’s back for their wedding photo. He said one of the children, now grown, stopped by the sculpture with his girlfriend recently and had her peer under the belly of the statue to see “his spot.”

And carved into another part of the underbelly is “DEL,” the nickname of the Giannotti’s son, Delano, now a freshman at Haddonfield Memorial High School.

The artist decided the skin of the dinosaur should be patterned and tinted, so there are brown and green markings on it, created by chemical applications.

“No one had ever made a close-to-life-size sculpture of this animal. There were bones made out of plaster of a Hadrosaurus at the Trenton State Museum, but they put a skull on it that was completely wrong.”

Some archaeologists and paleontologists thought the dinosaur should have a large plume on her head, but then they realized the animal had four toes and no dinosaurs with four toes were plumed.

“Think about the practicalities of a commission like this,” Giannotti said to the women’s club members. Based on bone measurements, a full-sized replica wouldn’t fit in the allotted space, so he planned a 75 percent reconstruction. Even with the reduction in size, the sculpture needed 2,600 pounds of bronze to create the likeness that would rest on two hind legs, one foreleg, and tail.

“It was like building a boat. A steel framework, covered with plywood, wrapped in cloth” and eventually covered with wax, a ceramic slurry and rubber to create the mold for the sculpture that is 3/8-inch thick.

Along the way, the 1,500 pounds of clay were dumped back into the big pot and the steel was scrapped. “At four bucks a pound you can’t use it just once,” he said.

Eighteen separate sections had to be soldered. “You can’t make a 17-foot-long sculpture in one pour,” Giannotti noted.

The bronze was melted in a 2,000-degree oven. Once poured, the statue was baked in a 1,600-degree oven.

Giannotti said he remembers clearly the day the statute was installed. “Usually there’s not much fanfare because there’s a later unveiling. We came up Kresson Road (hauling Haddie on a truck) and were met by fire trucks and police cars. Children’s groups were at the site, many of the, who had been in my studio. We dropped her by a crane into the site,” and it fit perfectly on the first try.

Giannotti later selected 24 of the children’s drawings and matched each to an artist, asking for an interpretation that would be displayed at an exhibit at the .

The artist said he doesn’t mind if people touch the sculpture or pose with it, but “I don’t want it dressed for Halloween. That’s disrespectful.”

“It’s been 60 million years since this animal walked around here. It’s kind of hard to get a likeness. And doesn’t everybody in town want to find the head?”

One of Giannotti’s more recent works has been installed at the Camden Shipyard and Maritime Museum. It depicts Matthew Henson, an African-American, who accompanied Robert Peary when he climbed to the North Pole in 1909.  Henson’s rule in that exploration was not acknowledged until 1937. The sculpture includes one of the dogs used in the exploration.

Other local works by Giannotti include the shark series near the Hopkins House Art Gallery on Cooper River Parkway—shark fins seeming to cut through the field—and the Victims of Terrorism memorial on the other side of the Cooper River.

Distributed at the Haddon Fortnightly meeting was a brochure written by Jacob Peacock last year as a project for his Eagle Scout recognition. It includes a 3-mile walking tour of Haddonfield with nine historic sites.