MARBLE HILL — It’s hard not to notice when someone new moves into the tiny town of Marble Hill, population 1,500, especially when it’s a 30-foot dinosaur.

On March 14, the Bollinger County Museum of Natural History unveiled its newest exhibit: a gigantic sculpture of Hypsibema missouriense, also known as the colossal hadrosaur. The creature became Missouri’s official state dinosaur in 2004 after decades of discovery, art and even a little politicking.

Creating the hadrosaur replica wasn’t easy. It began as a block of Styrofoam, which sculptors hewed into the rough shape of the Hypsibema’s body. The form was then covered in clay, sculpted again and covered with a silicone rubber to create a series of molds. After reinforcing the stiffness, fiberglass was inserted into the molds.

Museum curator and co-founder Guy Darrough and crew then carried the cumbersome body parts into the museum, where they pieced together the prehistoric puzzle. A pair of eyeballs from a taxidermist made the 30-foot sculpture complete.

The entire process took Darrough several months, and that doesn’t count the years of excavation it took to find all the bone fragments that helped create a picture of what the hadrosaur looked like.

It started more than half a century ago, in 1942, when the Chronister family decided to dig a well. About 8 feet into their dig, they came across some bones but thought little of it. It was just by coincidence that Dan Stewart came across the Chronisters that day while he was doing a geological land survey in the area.

“Everything fell into as right of a pattern as it could have that day,” said Mike Fix, a Chronister site digger and associate professor of geology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. “If they would have dug even just a few feet away, they wouldn’t have found anything. I know, because we did.”

Stewart, who was originally searching for clay deposits, asked the Chronisters if he could take the bones, then sent them to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where dinosaur expert Charles Gilmore determined they were part of a dinosaur tail, according to The Journal of Paleontology.

In the 1970s, Bruce Stinchcomb bought the land that included the dig site from Olle Chronister and allowed Fix and Darrough, who were students working with the Eastern Missouri Society for Paleontology at the time, to dig throughout the 1980s and ’90s.

“We’re so lucky that Bruce purchased the land,” Fix said. “This way, people can study it.”

Remains of two other genuses of dinosaurs, including an older relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex that fed on the hadrosaur, have been identified at the site. They’ve also found the remains of turtles, crocodiles and freshwater sharks.

“We have a huge bone bed from the dig,” said Eva Dunn, president of the Bollinger County museum’s board of curators. “There’s a lot of natural history and some people history, too.”

It was legislation sponsored by now-House Speaker Rod Jetton, a Marble Hill native, that won the hadrosaur its official designation as the state dinosaur.

“States can make whatever they want their state dinosaur; It’s all just legislation,” Fix said. “But this is only place in Missouri where dinosaur bones have been found. And we have found enough fragments to put together a whole dinosaur, as opposed to just a tooth.”