#fossil prep

Some other misc things I do! Fossil prep work, never gets old.

NEW RAPTOR HAND! This is the partial hand of a raptor dinosaur that we collected from our super-site "Jack's bonebed" in 2024. It does not look quite right to be from the troodontid raptor that we have been collecting from this site, so we think it is from another skeleton that we have only just identified coming out of the same bed - a parrot-mimic oviraptorid (technically a Caenagnathid). We have a few tentative pieces of this skeleton so far, but it's looking really promising!

What's especially cool about this specimen is that it contains the "semi-lunate carpal" (meaning: half-moon wrist bone, outlined in red). This strange little bone was really important in the "birds are dinosaurs" debate: when the raptor bends its wrist, the twisted shape of the semi-lunate carpal means the arm folds like the wing of a bird. Super cool!

I purposely left a bit of matrix between the bones for stability. The bone is fairly crunchy and cracked so there was a little Apoxie gap filling plus the tiny cracks in the bones had to be meticulously cleaned grain by grain. All work done under a compound lens microscope between 12-50x magnification.

yet another cervical from our small azhdarchid (this is the fourth verified so far)

Daspletosaurus surangular. Not a lot of tyrannosaur material from Jack's so this was a surprise.

midsized theropod pelvic element

unremarkable hadrosaur rib (usually ribs like this aren't worth the effort of making a cradle, but it wanted to collapse under its own weight)

Prepared with ZOIC air scribes and air abrasion on a Swam-Blaster.

Here's a Troodontid braincase I recently completed preparing using small air scribes, carbowax techniques, and air abrasion under high magnification microscopes. Every square millimeter of this paper-thin hydroxyapatite wants to shatter like tempered glass.

There are probably fewer than 10 Troodontid braincases in the world, and most are squashed flat. This new specimen is preserved in 3D so it'll be put it in a micro-CT scanner to see the inside of the brain cavity. I purposely left matrix inside the cavity because it could have data that the CT scanner could let us see and acts as a support for the brittle bone.