Fossils don’t exactly come clean and ready to be displayed in museums. Which, duh, of course. They’re a mess because they’ve been in the ground for thousands and thousands of years. So it’s on the job for fossil preparators like Nathan Ong at the Natural History Museum of Utah to clean up the vertebrae of dinosaurs and the teeth of mastodons to get them looking like what we expect them to look like.
It’s fun to see the whole tool set at work. Drills, power tools, chisels, scalpels, brushes of every kind, glue, and more are put to work for hours and hours until the fossil is ready.
[Nathan Ong via Atlas Obscura]
