This specifically is the skull of a dinosaur
from a group of families called the Ankylosaurus,
the armored dinosaurs, if you can imagine
an armadillo with a lot of spikes all over
it.
It's a common misconception that bones are
dug in the field where they're found, but
what actually happens is a researcher will
be walking through deserted barren canyon
land looking for bones sticking out of the
rocks or weathering out.
A trench is dug around the specimen, then
it is wrapped in bandages so it's in plaster,
which is what you see here.
So this is straight from the field where it
was found in Mongolia.
For this material I would use small tools
like these needles and things like that and
some brushes to slowly work off the rock from
the bone.
This is soft enough where I can use these
kind of needles and things like that to kind
of gently work it off.
We're basically chipping away until we get
to the surface of the bone and then what we're
doing from there is following the line of
the bone around, gradually removing the rock
as we're doing so.
So what I'm doing is essentially just using
this needle to softly work off the surface
of the rock till I get to the layer of bone
underneath.
I've been working on this piece already for
about five months already, and it's probably
gonna take me another three or four to get
it to the condition that the researchers want
it in and every year these researchers go
out to the field and collect hundreds of specimens
and they bring them back here to the Museum.
A lot of times we just find pieces you see
here, they're just broken pieces of bones
of individual dinosaurs and things like that.
But once in a while we do get whole dinosaurs
and this tells us very much about the anatomy.
This is how we know certain dinosaurs were
actually, how their bones were arranged and
things like that.
Using a silicon rubber, we've actually made
a mold of the skull here.
And then filling it in with an epoxy resin,
we basically make a copy of the skull, you
can see here, and this is research-quality,
you can take this under a CT scan and it will
literally have all the folds and wrinkles
and cracks of the original specimen.
We'll take about four copies of each bone
that we do.
One scientific quality cast, another one for
the home institutions, whatever country we
got it from they'll get a copy of it, as well.
Somebody will sit here and literally block
out these pieces, put them back together and
mold the whole thing all together and get
this cast that you see here.
