In the months since we lowered the massive skull into its custom “Rex Rack,” it has gone from being almost fully-encased in sandstone to showing off these incredibly well-preserved teeth…
When we remove a fossil from the field, we keep it encased in a good amount of the matrix—the sediment or rock where it was found—and wrap it in a plaster field jacket to protect it. That way we can save the delicate detail work for preparators back at the museum.
That’s exactly what happened with the T. rex skull when it was collected* by a team of Burke paleontologists and volunteers from the fossil riverbed where it was discovered in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana as part of the Hell Creek Project led by Greg Wilson, Burke Museum curator of vertebrate paleontology.
Prior to the opening of the T. rex LIVE, our team started cutting into the plaster field jacket, referencing handwritten notes on the cast to avoid hitting any exposed areas of bone.
The team, led by Michael Holland, Burke Museum Hell Creek Preparator and designated “T. rex wrangler,” used an oscillating saw to cut through the plaster in a process similar to how a doctor might cut a cast from a broken arm.
Many of the fossils that we prepare at the museum are surrounded by extremely hard rock, which requires months—or even years—of work to reveal the bone.
Much to the prep team’s delight, most of the sandstone surrounding the T. rex skull is very soft and easy to work with—a lot of the work can be done with small hand tools like what you would find at a dentist’s office.
There were even a few teeth that were peeking out of the rock when they put the plaster jacket on it in the field.
Recently, the team rotated the skull in the “Rex Rack” to redistribute the weight and begin working on different areas of the skull, including more of the teeth.
