Fourteen Bambu Lab Printers Rebuilt a 166-Million-Year-Old Dinosaur at Blenheim Palace

A nine-meter Megalosaurus skeleton made of 3D-printed bones went on display at Blenheim Palace in England this month. The installation, titled Dinosaurs Are Forever, is hard to miss: five colorful sculptures occupy the palace gardens through November 1, 2026. What makes the project notable is not just the scale. It is the fact that fourteen desktop Bambu Lab printers did most of the work.

A print farm builds a dinosaur

British artist Jay Jay Burridge conceived the exhibition through his studio Future Fossils. Rather than carve the enormous skeletons by hand or rely on traditional fabrication, the team turned to additive manufacturing. Palaeontologist Matthew Dempsey sculpted every bone in software. Gerard Shields of UK additive manufacturing firm Printpool then sliced and printed the parts.

Shields used a fleet of fourteen Bambu Lab printers running roughly seven weeks. The material was ABS-GF, an ABS filament reinforced with glass fiber. After printing, the parts went to the Future Fossils workshop for finishing and assembly. The result is five full-sized Megalosaurus skeletons posed in different expressive positions.

Why desktop printers?

The project could have used industrial machines. Instead, Printpool relied on consumer-grade hardware scaled into a farm. Each printer ran 24/7 producing vertebrae and other bone sections. The approach kept costs down and proved that a desktop print farm can scale to produce parts far larger than any single machine.

Nadia Yaakoubi, Bambu Lab's head of PR and communications, called the project a powerful example of modern technology bringing ancient stories to life. The location adds another layer. Blenheim Palace sits in Oxfordshire, where the original Megalosaurus fossils were first discovered. Two centuries after Oxfordshire introduced the world to the first scientifically named dinosaur, visitors can now walk beneath a nine-meter version of it.

The details

The Dinosaurs Are Forever exhibition runs through November 1, 2026, in the gardens at Blenheim Palace. Tickets are included with a Park & Gardens entry or Annual Pass. Visitors who want to compare the 3D-printed version with the real thing can visit the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where the original Megalosaurus fossils are on display.