A Tail from the Prep Lab
An Update from Tia - Fossil Prep Lab Manager!
In the fossil lab, we have been working hard and making great progress on specimens big and small. We still have quite a few field jackets from previous seasons that are taking up valuable space and need to be prepped. As we begin to make preparations for our upcoming field season this summer, the current goal is to get as many of these fossils out of their jackets, prepped, 3-D scanned, and stored either in our on-site storage at the Academy of Natural Sciences or transported to our off-site collections located at the Cincinnati Museum Center - our permanent repository. Our current ongoing projects are the remaining tail vertebrae of our purported Suuwassea specimen and Diplodocus material from the Mother’s Day Quarry. In the pre-COVID era the lab maintained a high level of efficiency due to our ability to have a large volunteer crew. While we are grateful that we are able to continue work in our lab space, projects are taking much longer given our very limited crew of two preparators. We are slowly but surely making progress on our specimens!
Tia working on the most proximal tail vertebra retrieved from Montana last fall.
Probably the most exciting project is finishing preparation on the last of the Suuwassea tail vertebrae. This past fall Jason Schein drove out to our field site in Montana to rescue the jacket containing these vertebrae from the approaching harsh Montana winter and safely return it to the lab. We removed six extremely well preserved and articulated caudal, or tail, vertebrae from the jacket. We are now in the process of finding fits for all of the fossil fragments also found in the field jacket and cleaning the surface of these fossils. Our next step will be filling in any gaps, cracks, or missing pieces of each vertebra with a special putty for stability before we have them 3-D scanned. With the completion of preparation on these last six tail vertebrae, we will have the entire articulated tail of Suuwassea ready to go for research!
They may not look so hot right now, but these crumbly Diplodocus tail vertebrae from the Mother’s Day Site are going to look great soon!
We are also making great progress on smaller specimens from our Mother’s Day Quarry. Unfortunately, most of these specimens belonging to the dinosaur Diplodocus are not as well preserved as our Suuwassea material. Even though they are small, it has been a much slower process of removing these fossils from their field jackets and then piecing them back together. Although, fossil preparation is always extremely rewarding when you complete a more challenging project!