There is a huge Barosaurus fossil in the Dinosaur gallery on the second floor of ROM. They were giant plant-eating sauropods that lived during the late Jurassic period about 150 million years ago. Barosaurus weighed about 10 tons when alive, twice as much as an elephant!
This 27-meter-long dinosaur fossil, named Gordo, ranks second in completeness in the world and only next to the collection of the British Museum.
The skeleton of Barosaurus is reddish brown. More than 40% of Barosaurus' length consisted of its slender neck; its barrel-shaped body only accounted for about 15% of its total length. Its tail is as long as its neck and extends to your left, all the way to the other end of the dinosaur gallery.
As early as 1962, the then curator Gordo obtained these Barosaurus fossils from Chicago in preparation for participating in a Dinosaur Exhibition. However, due to insufficient exhibition space, they were not installed but placed in a warehouse.
Fast forward to 2007, curator and paleontologist Dr. Dave Evans was searching for a Barosaurus. He heads to Wyoming in hopes of buying sauropod fossils that are still in the ground. On the plane, he read a paper that mentioned a sauropod skeleton in the ROM collection. At that time, Dave's jaw dropped and he really wanted to turn the plane around immediately.
When Dave returned to the museum, he discovered that Barosaurus was there but had been misnamed and never properly managed. So Dave worked with ROM Assistant Curator to put all the pieces together.
They found half an arm bone in a drawer, a leg bone on a shelf, and vertebrae under a plastic plate. The bones were never stored and pieced together. When everyone finally put everything together, they ended up with about half the skeleton of one of the amazing, extra-long-necked sauropods. In order to commemorate the old curator, they named the Barosaurus fossil Gordo.