Peter May

With 12 years of experience working in the palaeontology departments at the Royal Ontario Museum and Royal Tyrrell Museum, Peter saw an opportunity to establish a company that could service the technical needs of museums locally, throughout Canada, and internationally. Incorporating Research Casting International Ltd in 1987, 35 years later with 50,000 sq ft and 40 employees it is the largest company in the world providing technical services for museums internationally. Specializing in building dinosaurs, the
largest visitor draw in all major museums, Research Casting has worked within the wave of new constructions of museums and exhibits that has been going on throughout the world since 1990.

In-house capabilities consist of fossil preparation and conservation, molding, casting bronze and aluminum casting, mounting original fossil skeletons with hand-forged external armatures, paleontological reconstruction, 3D laser scanning and printing. Research Casting has mounted well over 900 hundred skeletons over the past 35 years for museums throughout the world. RCI has received major commissions from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the British Museum of Natural
History in London, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the National Science Museum in Tokyo. RCI’s work is represented in many other museums in the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, China, Japan and South America.

RCI, in June of 2019, finished a five year project with the Smithsonian, National Museum of Natural History in Washington to dismantle, conserve and remount over 50 skeletons for their new fossil halls. The installation of various skeletons at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, installing new exhibits at the University of Michigan just finished mounting the Jurassic Mile exhibits at the Children’s Museum of
Indianapolis which included going in the field and collecting, preparing and mounting two new sauropods from the badlands in Wyoming. Presently working on conserving and reinstallation of 10 skeletons for the new galleries at the Yale-Peabody Museum along with a refurbishment of galleries at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.