Corrections & Clarifications: An earlier version of story incorrectly stated the Brachiosaur bone that was on display. The Children's Museum of Indianapolis displayed a femur bone.

A newly discovered ecosystem from 150 million years ago will dramatically improve scientists' understanding of the Jurassic Period and change how kids learn about dinosaurs at The Children's Museum of Indianapolis.

The museum announced Monday that it is leading a major excavation as part of a $27.5 million project. "Mission Jurassic" will seek to uncover artifacts, some of which will be used to expand its popular "Dinosphere" exhibit.

The materials for the project comes from a rural Wyoming site called "The Jurassic Mile." It comprises myriad layers of marine sediments, creatures that lived in the ocean and lakes, fossilized plants and animals, and dinosaur tracks that show a rare picture of how life worked in the Late Jurassic Period.

“It’s almost like a big layer of dirt was just dropped on something like the city and preserved everything,” said Richard Herrington, acting director of science at The Natural History Museum. "An example might be what happened at Pompeii in Italy, when you had a volcanic eruption that preserved everything together.”

The museum will partner with The Natural History Museum in London, the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in the Netherlands and the University of Manchester to lead more than 100 scientists who will work in the Morrison Formation in Wyoming.

"The Jurassic Mile" resides in the Morrison Formation, a series of rocks rich with fossils that crawl through the Western United States. Scientists have known about the formation for more than a century, said Phil Manning, chair of natural history at the University of Manchester.

But the area, and especially the mile, is so rich with paleontological artifacts that it hasn't yet been fully explored. And it's leading scientists to discoveries that will flesh out the way we understand prehistoric times.

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A 5-foot, 1-inch Brachiosaur femur unveiled Monday to a packed crowd of children at the museum was one such discovery.

"I want to show kids the process of science," Manning said. "I want them to feel the anticipation before the race. I want them to be part of that race, the exhilaration you feel as sprinters run down that 100-meter stretch and that amazing feeling of 'wow' euphoria when they get across the line. Then the cup-giving process" of winning.

How museum's Mission Jurassic began

The Dinosphere exhibit draws in 80 percent of those who visit The Children's Museum. And on its 10th anniversary in 2014, the museum posed this question to its international advisers: How could it be refreshed?

Because Dinosphere already explores the Cretaceous Period, which is the last period before the dinosaurs became extinct, the experts suggested digging into the Jurassic Period, which came before it, said Jeffrey H. Patchen, president and CEO of The Children's Museum. The Morrison Formation provided a good starting point, and paleontologists found four quarries brimming with fossils inside "The Jurassic Mile."

The museum has 18 years left on a 20-year lease from the landowner, during which time it receives the fossils it finds there, Patchen said. Almost 600 specimens have been recovered over the past two years, including an 80 foot-long Brachiosaur and 90-foot-long Diplodocid.

The Lilly Endowment and Susie and Jack Sogard have made lead gifts totaling $9.25 million toward the $27.5 million price tag. Susie Sogard is an honorary trustee for the museum.

"This lead gift ... allows us to make the announcement and kick off serious digging," Patchen said. "We've done just two summers of digging on our own and wanted to open this up because of the discoveries of what we found. This is a much bigger project than what we started with."

That leaves about $18 million to raise, Patchen said. The money will fund extracting fossils from the ground, removing them from their stone matrix and mounting them onto a frame strong enough to support them. The museum also would like to endow dig operations and the positions of Manning and Victoria Egerton, who are scientists-in-residence at the museum. Egerton also is a research fellow at the University of Manchester.

The other museums working on Mission Jurassic are funding their own resources for their staff and excavation work, Patchen said. The museums will share fossils and casts.

"This is new in worldwide museum cooperation, so I think this is a very special thing," said Jeroen Snijders, who is the director of collections for the Naturalis Biodiversity Center. "And I hope we can extend this, that more museums and especially the Europe-United States combination will extend this."

Thousands of years of research are possible

After the super-continent broke up in the Middle Jurassic Period, the climate systems and the Earth's lifeforms began to change. The Morrison Formation happened in the Late Jurassic Period, about 155 million years ago to 148 million years ago.

"We see this burst of evolution in the Jurassic, and it's where dinosaurs truly become big for the first time," Manning said.

Although paleontologists have been excavating the Morrison Formation for more than a century, thousands of miles in Wyoming still have yet to be deeply explored. Herrington said the site is remote, and excavation requires a great deal of expense and time. Digging up a single dinosaur could take several years. And paleontologists must find ways to safely recover the fossils without leaving the area in a poor state environmentally, he said.

Recent technology has allowed for drones to capture aerial shots that show potentially fossil-rich spots, Herrington said.

"There are a lot of kids that come to this museum, and they're going to think, 'Oh, they've found it all.' No, we haven't," Manning said. "There's enough here at this single site to keep a bunch of paleontologists going probably for 1,000 years."

"The Jurassic Mile" contains bones that are set the way they were when the dinosaurs were living, like a skeleton that's all together, Manning said. What's more, the site contains plant fossils that show what the creatures ate, which will help paleontologists understand why plants with so little nutrients gave dinosaurs the means to grow so large.

“It’s a bit like me giving you a diet of water and oats for your whole life and you end up being 30 feet tall," Manning said. "You know, that’s a hard thing to ask. But the metabolism and physiology of these creatures enabled them to get so big. And we truly do not yet understand how they managed it.”

How will this change the museum?

Patchen said he plans to have two huge Sauropods on the ramp that descends into Dinosphere by 2022. The hallway near Dinosphere will feel like an underwater reincarnation of a Mesozoic Age marine area with fossilized fish.

Environmental Systems Research Inc., which generates maps and spatial analytics software, will help the museum develop a StoryMap of the site that gives more information about the how the dinosaurs lived and background on the working paleontologists.

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