Preparing a fossil is often more of an art than a science. The results have implications for research and copyrights.
There's a lot this article touches on, but the parts about fossil preparation are kind of in poor taste. I'll go over some of it under the cut.
There's a reason we usually don't publish on things we prepare. They say it right here - we can literally, whether purposeful or accidental, modify fossils as we see fit. We could imitate pathologies or create marks with air scribes or picks that are misinterpreted as pathologies, remove or obscure parts of a fossil that may be diagnostic, etc. (Of course we don't endear to do these things, they're just possible).
Whether through inexperience or poor dexterity some budding preparators can cause damage that only someone with a trained eye could notice. Preparators aren't always required to be trained in the sciences or have thorough anatomical knowledge, and thus can reconstruct things wrong, without scientific guidance. Like filling holes where there's supposed to be… holes! Like a fenestrum or foramen, for example. This is why we have references, but more importantly, we do the minimum unless instructed to do otherwise by a supervisor or exhibits team - one of a few scenarios where a curator can rightfully step in.
This is why we're trained to preserve almost any bone we see. Often there are small isolated bone chunks hovering in matrix that are thrown in a box with the specimen. A lot of pieces can't be reattached because they're too weathered or of indeterminate origins (“IBF’s” for short).
"Creating" something "artistic" is another way of implying we're making it up as we go.
If someone hands me a fossil and tells me to look at this "multimedia sculpture", I'd be confused. It's a fossil, not an art project.
Academic fossil preparation is fundamentally a scientific endeavor that also requires artistic abilities, but not creativity. We use various methods that are tried and true (and sometimes experiment with new ones) to expose an element from matrix.
The act of preparing a fossil is not providing new data. The fossil itself is the data. We just make it available. That being said, if we provide measurements, take and analyze samples of the matrix for various analyses, then that's providing valuable data. Would that warrant an authorship? Maybe.
This raises another question though. If anyone who worked on a fossil gets an authorship, then can authorship compound?
The person who found the fossil but didn't do anything with it afterwards - just dug it up and sent it to the lab, for example. Do they get to be an author? On our field crews we have up to 30 people over the whole season. 30 coauthors and 99% of them are not scientists.
The collections manager who just painted a number on it, catalogued it, and put it away?
How about the curator who allowed a researcher access to the collection who didn't collect any data but just answered some emails and opened the drawer for it to be studied?
The land owner who gave you permission to dig?
Finally, the preparator who just exposed it from the rock. They do more science inherently than the others, but if no parts of the scientific method were conducted and no data was produced (save for the fossil simply being brought back into the world), do they get an authorship?
tl;dr We don't need authorships for the act of preparing fossils unless we provide data and go through the scientific process (like what's usually required for any authorship). Many parts of the process is not science. Just acknowledge our work in your paper and we'll be more than happy.