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A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

arstechnica.com

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Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#51

Post by tduberne »

unwind wrote: post #37

This bit: It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours. Is just staggering. I'm old(ish…

To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with every detail of its skin, until you know its features better than your own. For millions of year, it was encased in cold stone, as a fairy tale princess enclosed in a cold room, that you would be preparing for its first night in the world.

I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#52

Post by pc86 »

beezlebroxxxxxx wrote: post #49
lisper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?

a) That's why they are a specialist. They are trained in the techniques to differentiate the fossil structure from the surrounding matrix (to the best of their ability). One of the biggest differences is texture; bone is very porous relative to most rock. Under a microscope that difference is much more apparent. You can also lick it because the porous texture of fossil sticks to your tongue more than the surrounding…

> That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.

And licking it, it seems :)

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#53

Post by bluGill »

lisper wrote: post #43
unwind wrote: post #37

This bit: It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours. Is just staggering. I'm old(ish…

I've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?

It normally isn't that hard. The rock and fossil parts look very different. Go to anyplace where you are allowed to take fossil rocks and do it yourself. It isn't hard to visually see where the rock (limestone ends and the fossil starts. Any 3rd grader can do a reasonable job of separating rock from fossil. There are parks like that all over - most fossils are just another clam (or similar sea creature) of the same type experts have seen millions (billions?) of and so there is nothing interesting left to discover.

Note, do not let the above take away the work experts do. While a 8 year old can do it, those are the easy cases, and a few "hammer slips" don't matter. There is a level of detail that trained hands can do better. There are many types of rocks that can hold fossils, and not all are easy as limestone to work with (limestone is the majority though).

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#55

Post by ComputerGuru »

httgp wrote: post #19
austinjp wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Link to the header image from article, as far as I can tell since I'm on mobile: https://i.natgeofe.com/n/e5966d6a-e93c-4f3d-839f-a228f34fdb3...

Holy smokes this looks like it’s straight out of House of the Dragon.

That doesn’t sound like high praise! The quality of the CGI on that show leads me to deduce they were short-changed rather badly given the reported production costs.

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#56

Post by lupire »

bluGill wrote: post #53
lisper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?

It normally isn't that hard. The rock and fossil parts look very different. Go to anyplace where you are allowed to take fossil rocks and do it yourself. It isn't hard to visually see where the rock (limestone ends and the fossil starts. Any 3rd grader can do a reasonable job of separating rock from fossil. There are parks like that all over - most fossils are just another clam (or similar sea creature) of the same t…

> so there is nothing interesting left to discover

Not true (see OP!), but the odds of finding something interesting are very small.

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#57

Post by Ruthalas »

tduberne wrote: post #51
unwind wrote: post #37

This bit: It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours. Is just staggering. I'm old(ish…

To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with eve…

While I entirely agree with the gist of your comment, if the process of "unclothing my first love" took 7,000 hours, I might have to reconsider.

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#58

Post by eouwt »

fsckboy wrote: post #29
Groxx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For further context: "dinosaurs" covers a time range MUCH longer than the time since they went extinct, i.e. enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve. There was a large variety. An extremely large variety. As much as we are understandably excited about feathers being a thing that we didn't realize earlier, in 100+ mi…

> enough time for almost all mammals and modern birds and darn near everything you can see today except crocodiles and horseshoe crabs to evolve. I know what you're trying to say, but every living thing today, from the mammals to the fungus among us, have spent the same amount of time evolving, dating back to the first life, or at least the first life encoded for reproduction. Except for the birds, the dinosaurs quit…

Technically yes, but in practice I think the victims and survivors of extinction events might beg to differ

Re: A dinosaur with a remarkably preserved face

#60

Post by divbzero »

unwind wrote: post #37

This bit: It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours. Is just staggering. I'm old(ish…

Props also to the Canadian miners with the sharpness of vision and presence of mind to spot the dinosaur and stop digging:

Despite the pace of operations, one particular shovel operator, Shawn Funk, happened to notice something after taking a big chunk out of the cliff. It was thanks to him and several people within Suncor that operations stopped in that area and the Royal Tyrrell was notified.

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