Monday, July 14, 2014

A cookie goes to the doctor.... "well, I'm feeling crumby..."

Remember this? The pictures that are "just the way the cookie crumble?"
Well, now you can hardly recognize it, right?

 This is the result of a lot of glue, a fair bit of time, some patience, and removing all of the fragments which are now lovingly sorted by what part of the vertebrae they are from in hopes of being able to rebuild the rest of the bones.

 That being said, you may notice that the box with the loose pieces is not shown. Well... yeah. It's not much to look at.

 Turns out a couple of the pieces (for example, the longest fragment in the old picture) are ribs. Rhino ribs have a divet up near the vertebrae, and so they're relatively distinct. I also noticed that the vertebrae are heart shaped. A younger me would have been really excited about that... and I've gotta say they still look pretty cool. Turns out that there are bony plates between the vertebrae, possibly indicating that the owner was a juvenile; these should have fused later in life.

 So we shall see if Rick sees this as worth piecing back together. Reminds me of the repair work I did on the hadrosaur, Nancy, back home, only that involved several shelves of fragments and pieces kind of everywhere because it was being cleaned by multiple people. Here we go again!

2 comments:

  1. mikeJuly 15, 2014 at 8:34 PM

    You're funny.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. EMBSJuly 25, 2014 at 8:29 PM

      In comparison to Nancy, this one will be a piece of cake, right?

      Ok. time to stop with the food puns and satisfy my apparently hungry stomach....

      Delete

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My Story (Very briefly...)

Lots of people claim that they wanted to be paleontologists at the age of 3. So did I. The problem is, I never really grew out of it. My third birthday party had dinosaurs. Everywhere. I grew up digging in fossil dirt from Aurora, NC, looking for coral and shark teeth. I practically lived at my local science museums (and still do, only now I get to do research, fossil preparation, and work in collections!) When local paleontologists discovered a dinosaur with a "fossilized heart" (no longer considered such) when I was little, I got to meet the man who led the work. And then, years later a dinosaur bone with soft tissue turned up. I was officially hooked.
No longer was I dreaming about dinosaurs. I was actively pursuing the science behind prehistoric creatures. I didn't want to read about it, I wanted in on the action. So I started working at the museum, and finally going on my own adventures. And thus, I needed a place to share them and maybe inspire others the way I was inspired. I have gone from watching fossils be prepared from one side of the glass at the museum to working on them on the inside of the glass. I am a student working toward my goal. I can finally start to call myself a paleontologist.