Dave Hone

My, my boss drove into town, hired a guy with a JCB.

He drove out, picked it up with the bucket and drove it back into town and put it on the back of a flatbed.

And we drove it to Beijing.

you're out in a protected area and you can't you've got two choices you can take it out by hand but that means it's got to be light enough that half a dozen people can lift it which if it's a block of stone the size of this desk you know couple of meters by a couple of meters by a meter high is basically impossible so that means you either got to carve chunks off so take the head off take the arm off and whatever and

And you can get it out that way, but it's not ideal.

There's always the risk of breaking.

You're losing some information.

And if you want to make a really spectacular display, you don't want to join through every big bit of bone.

You want to show the public one piece.

So the alternative is to get rid of every bit of rock you possibly can to make it light enough to helicopter it out.

And so normally, so in China, if we hit, yeah, if we hit that bit of bone going in, we're just like going in round the sides until we've hit it.

Take the top off, take the bottom off and just take it.

So the skeleton is completely encased in rock and it's as safe and secure as it can be.

And then we'll do the preparation work back at the lab.

If you're going to have to lift it with a helicopter and they've got a weight limit of only a couple of tons, or if it's not, then you need to pay twice as much for a much more expensive helicopter, then you take off every gram of rock that you think you can to get the weight down so you can ship it.

So it varies massively.

Summing the size of Stan...

That's months of work.

You're probably doing that across three or four years with a team of half a dozen people.

Yeah, but it was the Larson brothers from the Black Hills Institute who dug it up.