SCP-250

SCP-250 SCP-250 is a fossilized dinosaur skeleton that gets up and goes about its day like it still has an actual body. It hunts, wanders around its enclosure, sleeps at night, and tries to eat anything it considers prey. Including people. Nobody has explained what is holding it together or making it move. The skeleton is an allosaur, originally identified as Allosaurus fragilis, although an unfinished paper belonging to a missing paleontologist suggests that identification might be wrong. There are 153 separate bones and fourteen replacement pieces made from plaster and fiberglass. Those replacement pieces are part of the moving animal too. That detail makes the whole thing stranger to me. Whatever brought it to life appears perfectly willing to accept the museum's repairs as part of its body. It doesn't have organs. Food falls through the openings in its skull, neck, and rib cage, and once that happens, it loses interest in the remains. But the Foundation still feeds it a live adult pig every other day because satisfying the hunting behavior helps keep its aggression predictable. Feeding it is about managing the animal's instincts. There is no stomach to fill. Its enclosure is essentially a small artificial prairie surrounded by thick, padded steel walls. Temperature and humidity are controlled both for its behavior and to preserve the fossil material. So they have to manage an active predator while also taking care of a museum specimen. Those are two very different jobs that happen to involve the same dinosaur. Then there is the cleaning. Personnel wait until it has been dormant for at least an hour and clean scraps of its meal off the bones with compressed air and little brooms. They have to avoid moving any component more than a meter because that can disturb its dormancy. It wakes within five minutes of sunrise, and nobody is allowed inside during its active period. Imagine having a job where part of your night consists of brushing meat out of a sleeping dinosaur skeleton while keeping track of sunrise. The discovery leaves some unanswered questions. It was excavated as an approximately eighty-percent-complete skeleton, and nothing anomalous was recorded at that point. It was later mounted in a museum. The Foundation became involved after it killed an intruder one night. The paleontologist's office had also been badly vandalized, and the paleontologist disappeared. The body was definitely not the missing scientist. Beyond that, the file doesn't settle what happened, who the intruder was, or whether the vandalism had anything to do with the skeleton waking up. I like that it leaves those pieces sitting there. We get enough to see that something happened at that museum, and then we're left with a dinosaur that apparently intends to continue being a dinosaur for as long as somebody can keep its bones intact. Original Entry: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-250