STEPS IN THE LAB PREPARATION OF A SAUROPOD FOSSIL, SPECIMEN STV, UPPER JURASSIC MORRISON FORMATION, WYOMING

The journey from excavating a dinosaur bone field jacket, made up of toilet paper, strips of burlap, and plaster used to protect the fossil, to being on display at a museum includes a delicate intermediate stage of preparation in the laboratory setting. This project was to complete this lab preparation stage, and to take a dinosaur bone from a field jacket to that of a specimen ready for study and research. The specimen prepared was labeled a Stegosaurus caudal vertebrae and was found in 2002 at the Nickopod site in the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation near Shell, Wyoming. The Morrison Formation is in the Western United States and contains layers of sedimentary rocks as well as fossils from the Jurassic Period. The jacket was prepared on the University of Lynchburg campus in the Haiar Paleontology Lab, and under the mentorship of Lucy Treado, research technician at the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville.

The process initially started with the cutting open of the jacket and continued with the removal of the toilet paper and plaster on top of the bone to expose the matrix. This was followed by the breaking up of surrounding rock using the paleotool microjack sizes 5 and 3, as well as using dental picks to loosen pieces, and tweezers to remove. After this was cleaned, the jacket was flipped to begin work on the other side, and the same process was repeated. In order to flip the jacket, a cradle was constructed with a cushion layer that was topped with medical gauze to layer over and harden. Some experimental techniques were used with acetone and water to remove excess glue with dental picks and brushes that held pieces of tiny bone fragments that had been incorrectly placed and glued on top.

Now that this stage of preparation is complete, the fossil will be returned to the museum to get the final stage of cleaning with a micro-sandblasting tool before being displayed in an exhibit and used for research purposes. The fossil will continue to be studied in order to identify where on the body of the dinosaur it came from. An important finding from this process is that while initially identified as a Stegosaurus vertebrae in the field, was correctly identified as belonging to a sauropod.