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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.
Some other misc things I do! Fossil prep work, never gets old.
Something special about helping give a critter back part of its story, or being the first one to free it from the earth after an unfathomable amount of time.
Removing sediment from a Triceratops scapula.
Preparators Jeanne Kelly and Marilyn Fox finish up restoration of Xiphactinus fossil for 1996 gallery opening.
Fossil Prep - extracting an ammonite from its matrix
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
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.
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.
