fossil preparator

Find me and Steve on Twitch @𝗳𝗼𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗹𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗮𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗼𝗿 ! Contract fossil preparator at Badlands Dinosaur Museum working on a pygmy azhdarchid, an opisthotonic tyrannosaur, and a Lambeosaurus mummy.

[fossilprep]

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Some recently prepared small specimens. Claws, teeth, a tiny fish jaw, and a pretty sizable fish skull plate. All mostly prepared with air abrasion under a microscope.

The jaw is a portion of a Belonostomus maxilla.

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fish skull plate before and after

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Here's a salamander jaw collected in the summer of 2025. This is the sort of specimen that can only be prepared with very light air abrasion and matrix removal with a delicate and precise air scribe like the ZOIC Balaur. It will remain in the matrix for stability.

ID'd as Scapherpeton.

From Jack's Bonebed near Havre, MT in the Dinosaur Park Formation. Campanian, ~76 million years old.

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Recently prepared specimens 🦴

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.

From Jack's Bonebed, Judith River Formation near Havre, MT.

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We are a very serious institution.

Photos from the 2025 Badlands Dinosaur Museum fieldwork season.

COB jacket art by D. Barrera Guevara

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Just finished this juvie hadrosaur femur!

Initially tentatively ID'ed as an oviraptorosaur femur in the field, this bone is crushed in a way that's deceptively similar to the way theropod elements are usually crushed. Once the trochanter was exposed as I prepped it, it was certified ornithischian. We have a nice couple of baby hadro jaws from this site, so maybe there is a skeleton coming out!

From Jack's Bonebed near Havre, MT in the Dinosaur Park Formation. Campanian, ~76 million years old.

From US public lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management.

Skeletal image by Scott Hartman (from Wikimedia)

[tupandactylus]

what's your favorite controversial paleontology hypothesis?

Tyrannosaurus was exclusively a scavenger

Mythical creatures based on fossils

Triassic kraken is real

Sex lakes

Tanis is Paleocene

Toromorph hypothesis/Toro-Trike synonymy

Spinosaurus sail is a hump

Nanotyrannus is valid

other (notes)

results

Voting ended onOct 26, 2025

Reblog for a larger sample size 🦖

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Cockerellites liops (formerly Priscacara liops) from the F-1 Beds of the Green River Formation west of Kemmerer, Wyoming. Prepared under a Leica MZ 95 microscope using an HW-10 air scribe and air abrasion with sodium bicarbonate as the medium, among other tools and equipment.

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This is the new microscope we just had set up in the Badlands Dinosaur Museum fossil preparation lab 🔬

This week Paleontologist Mike Eklund arrived to deliver and assemble a "super-microscope" of his own design. This is a marriage of several different makes, models, and eras of surgical boom stereomicroscope components. The resulting combination yields the best possible solution for conducting detailed fossil preparation and preserved soft tissue detection on such a colossal specimen. This is one of just a few units of its kind that have ever been produced.

The body of the scope is a Zeiss. The head of the microscope is a Leica MZ12 that magnifies up to 100x and provides a long working distance for the ergonomic sake of the technicians. (For reference, most microscopes you see in fossil preparation labs don't even magnify up to 40x.) The eyepieces add additional magnification, and there are ergo-wedges that allow for the angling of the eyepieces to prevent strain on the technicians' neck and back.

It's been custom fitted with lighting fixtures on both sides of the main head. This is because the higher the magnification, the less light is let into the lens, like a camera.

A camera attachment is hooked up to the viewing port that streams directly to the monitor attached to the arm. This lets us stream what's under the microscope directly to the gallery by this fall/winter.

Full post on Facebook

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We've been busy at our Nodosaur site digging up an individual we've named "C.O.B.", with lots of elements from the tail, legs, and pelvis so far. This jacket contains one of its tibeae.

Illustration by D. Barrera Guevara.

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Hadrosaur fibula with a Tyrannosaur tooth embedded! The tooth is in the spongy bone on the proximal end of the bone, plus there are subtle bite marks along the shaft, which could point to scavenging behavior from a Tyrannosaur. This fibula is part of a skeleton we're currently excavating at Jack's Bonebed in Havre, Montana, and was found laying on top of the tibia.

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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.

From US Public Lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management - Montana/Dakotas

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Raptor brains!

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.

From US Public Lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management - Montana/Dakotas. Found by volunteer Tom Beckenholdt. Collected by Tom & Elizabeth Freedman Fowler.

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Preparing a Lambeosaurus

Jacket 2: articulated cervical series

Second jacket containing four articulated cervical vertebrae

There was a liberal application of thin, medium, and then thick Paraloid B-72 followed by supporting the broken surfaces with Carbowax strengthened by cheese cloth. Matrix removal was mainly done with a Microjack #3 under a microscope.

Steve Clawson applying carbowax to cheesecloth with a brush so it adheres to the cross sections of the centra

Cheesecloth coated with Carbowax functions similarly to rebar in concrete - it strengthens the Carbowax, which has the advantage of dissolving in warm water.

Lateral view of the vertebrae with portions of the centra missing

Part of the vertebrae were broken off and situated in a rock that also had some tendons and a quadratojugal.

After being carefully removed and cleaned, the missing piece was glued on with thick Paraloid B-72 and left to dry overnight.

Finally, gaps in the bone were filled in with Apoxie putty and the whole thing was given a coat of Paraloid.

The jacket lines up with the neck elements in the skull jacket. The vertebrae were compressed post-burial making them look smaller than they were in life.

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Partially disarticulated Mioplosus labracoides from the F-1 beds of the Green River Formation.

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Cockerellites liops for a client 🐟

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Badlands Dinosaur Museum posters from the 84th annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.