#museumvisitor

🐂 This is the famous Chaleux stone, one of the biggest pieces of Belgian’s ‘portable art’ (that could be carried from place to place). The slab is part of our collections and exhibited in the Gallery of Humankind.🐂

It was found in the region of Dinant and dates back to 12,000 to 13,000 years ago, from the so-called Magdalenian culture. Think: end of the last glacial period, the extinction of mammoths and Lascaux and Altamira cave art. Portable art was the result of carving or engraving bone, antler, ivory or stone. Some examples, like the Chaleux stone, are the earliest traces of realism in art.  

The object also gives us a glimpse of the biodiversity of that period. 🌿

The front side of the slab shows an auroch, an wild ancestor of our modern cattle. Aurochs were among the largest herbivores at that time: a shoulder height of up to 180 cm in bulls, and weighing up to 1300 kilos. It also had massive elongated and broad horns that reached 80 cm in length. This animal must have been an impressive sight! European aurochs went extinct a long time ago due to human activities: habitat loss and over-hunting.

Behind it you can see another animal, with antlers, that already roamed our regions during the Paleolithic : the forest reindeer. During prehistoric times, forest reindeers used to populate multiple regions across western Europe. Contrary to the aurochs, the species survived and is still found in smaller areas of Scandinavian and Karelian forests. 🦌🌲

On the other side of the stone: a wild horse, a standing ibex and one lying down. Can you spot them? 👀 We have scanned Belgian portable art so you can admire them in 3D: paleo-art.naturalsciences.be. There is even an anthropomorphic statuette (a Venus)!

https://paleo-art.naturalsciences.be/

This is Machimosaurus, an impressive crocdile-like Jurassic predator from our Evolution Gallery ! 

Machimosaurus is a crocodyliform of the Teleosaur family, which ruled the seas and oceans from the Upper Jurassic to the Early Cretaceous.

 Members of the Teleosaur family were initially more slender, with a much longer snout efficient at catching smaller preys such as fish. However, over time, Machimosaurus evolved to become particularly larger than its relatives, with a slightly shorter snout.  

Semi-aquatic, Machimosaurus was able to venture ashore to hunt. However, this exceptional swimmer was a master of deep-sea hunting. In the water, it used its short legs to steer and to keep balance, while its robust tail allowed Machimosaurus to propel itself. 

Other distinguishing features of this species were its massive skull and long snout. Using its conical, rounded teeth and an overpowering jaw force, Machimosaurus was able to target larger or shelled prey: fish, turtles and other marine reptiles, as well as some overly adventurous terrestrial species had to be especially cautious of this fierce predator. 

Fossils of this 100-million-year-old giant have been discovered in several countries across Europe and Africa. These findings have allowed palaeontologists to separate, to this date, the lineage of Machimosaurus into five probable species. 

One of these, the Machimosaurus rex recovered from a desert in Tunisia in 2016, could be the largest member of this lineage. According to various estimates, this animal could have grown up to more than 7 metres in length, for 3 tonnes: not the kind you'd want to meet in a face-off!