The Troubles of Transporting Fossils
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 10 ก.พ. 2024
- / ydaw -- Paleontologists learned pretty quick that if you try to move giant, heavy, yet fragile specimens across many miles, you're going to have a bad time. It also turns out it was a bit of a process to figure out the best way to move a fossil after it was out of the ground. So: the history of fossil jacketing!
Special thanks to Jason, Skye, Daniel, Antonio, and the rest of the crew from Elevation Science!
If you'd like to learn more about Elevation Science, visit their website: elevationscience.org/
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Contents:
00:20 Intro
02:05 The History of Fossil Jacketing
04:33 The First Great American Dinosaur Rush
18:48 Institutions and Practices (The Second Dinosaur Rush)
24:56 Materials and Methods (Interwar Years)
28:25 Why Plaster of Paris?
31:02 Visiting a Dig Site
31:50 Foil Packs
37:08 Jacketing Small-ish Specimens with JJs
51:47 Jacketing a Large Specimen
57:56 Conclusion
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Historical Photos in this video were sourced in part from The Commons on Flickr:
The Field Museum Library: www.flickr.com/photos/field_m...
Smithsonian Institution: flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/
SMU Libraries Digital Collections: www.flickr.com/photos/field_m...
Other sources include:
The National Park Service Gallery: npgallery.nps.gov/
The Library of Congress: www.loc.gov/
Wikimedia Commons: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ma...
The Biodiversity Heritage Library: www.biodiversitylibrary.org/
The Internet Archive: archive.org/
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Sources & Links:
Follow the link below for the full list, as it's far too big to fit into the description this time!
docs.google.com/document/d/1o...
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Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong
Attn: Steven Bellettini
1765 3 Mile Rd. NE # 150248
Grand Rapids, MI 49505
'YDAW' is a series that makes paleontology accessible to the general public using familiar (but wrong) dinosaur toys.
#YDAW #dinosaurs #fossil #paleontology #science #fossildig #dig #bones #dino #theropod #sauropod
If you like our stuff, and would like to help us keep making it, please consider chipping in over at patreon.com/YDAW, or taking a look at our products at www.ydawtheshop.com, or by buying Steven a coffee at ko-fi.com/ydawtheshow . All proceeds go back into making the videos you see here!
You guys have to do a video or video series on the history of Paleontology as a whole.
I just subscribed wishing I was the one to put your sub count over 100,000. Congratulations
Several months ago, a paleontologist student finishing her postgraduate posting on tiktok about her part in the excursion. Her team was excavating a titanosaur specimens from the mountain peaks IIRC in Argentina. The possible digging time range there was so limited by weather they've known about the site for years and were unable to excavate. As a result of the hostile conditions environmentally for the fossils, she was essentially tasked with being a courier. That is to say, sent with a 50 lb titanosaur leg bone unjacketed in a back pack, trekking about a 2 week journey on her own to the summit below where another team would be ready to take it and pack it up from there.
That sounds super cool! Well, maybe not the having to hike with 50+ pounds of potentially fragile specimen on your back for 2 weeks, that sounds hard. But the problem solving involved to get to that part. I'll have to track that down to see!
I want to say I'm shocked but, when you said Argentina it made sense.
If it was a Titanosaur, it was on the South in Patagonia, below the Pampas region; that zone is an absolute nightmare to drive with anything the moment you climb down the routes to go inside the provinces...and sometimes earlier, the roads can absolutely be part dirt for kilometers and you can get stuck even with a good 4x4 truck.
That poor woman's back 😭 specially if she had to do all this trip through the Patagonian fields, they are cold deserts with hard grass and almost no trees to protect from the sun or wind. And the wind in Patagonia is BRUTAL, we had been considering adding wind turbines down south for years for that reason.
In addition to the pick, rake, and sack technique, there was also the dynamite technique
I struggle to consider it a 'technique', but yes.
The sentence “they dynamited the holotype from one of these videos (don’t remember which one) will be always be stuck in my brain
@@sir_sparkeme too. It was ekrixanatosaurus. ” explosion-born reptile” because they dynamited the holotype😂. Giganotosaurus.
Truly the peak of humanity. We cannot fly too close to the sun, so we unfortunately had to stop
@@DryptosaurusDavid from what I gather that one was discovered because the remains were exposed by a mining explossion, not as blown up as part of it's own excavation.
Blood on the specimens sounds like a hardcore metal band made up of field workers during the winter break :)
That’s be #1 on my Spotify wrapped😂
The opening skits kill me every time. This whole story makes me far more appreciative of the fossils in the museums around me- Eastern Pennsylvania isn't particularly known for its dinosaurs, so everything we have had to travel quite a distance for us to learn about them.
Love all the skits they do, great and fun extra for each episode
In Indiana, no one's ever found a dinosaur fossil. Same for all of our neighbors (so far as I know), so any dinosaur you see in the state's been shipped in.
Same, in both living in a very non fossiliferous area sadly, and loving the opening stuff
I think we have a lot of cool stuff from the Paleozoic too though, which is very underappreciated
Is this true for michigan as well?@@JamieElli
The phrase "a living broken bone" isn't something I expected to hear today.
We're full of surprises.
@@YourDinosaursAreWronglol
Videos like these, that focus on aspects on paleantolgy often over looked, are one of the many reasons this channel has some of the best paleo videos out here. Grate work you guys.
Thank you so much! That means a lot to hear. :)
I appreciate the return of the fun intro delivery systems.
It was definitely fun to do a throwback to the older episodes. :)
@@YourDinosaursAreWrong Please keep doing them!
@@YourDinosaursAreWrongThey were always fantastic.
Best phrase ever
"Do paleontology to them"
50:37 can we get this guy in a Jurassic Park film? From his shirt to his distinctive shades to the way he talks a bout technical jargon in an understandable way, he could play the part for the charismatic field scientist.
Hear hear!
Seeing what happens to the plastered specimen when it hits the museum would be a cool follow up video. Especially learning more about the labelling information and learning how the puzzle gets put back together
Oh no. You post an hour long video just as I'm about to settle in and work on the pile of late assignments i have to do. What a terrible conundrum I now find myself in, curse you YDAW!
Kidding of course, always happy to see more long-form content!
We'll be here when you're done. ;)
14:32 Fun fact: shellac is also what the old 78-rpm records were made of, before the invention of vinyl.
And what hard furniture polishes were made with. Its great material for this kind of work because it's impervious to water, dries very hard, and only requires alcohol for preparing or removing. So a cheap and easy to acquire solvent.
When I heard the "pick, rake and sack" technique, a part of me died inside
Always fun to see The Paleontologist in his natural environment.
There's a small 1902 "note" on the transportation of the Iguanodons of Bernissard to the Museum of Brussels: De Pauw, L.F., 1902. Notes sur les fouilles du charbonnage de Bernissart. Découverte, solidification et montage des Iguanodons. The bones were especially brittle due to their fossilization in pyrite so it posed some unique challenges. Overall, 130 tons of fossils were transported on "tapissières", wagons designed for the transportation of goods.
Your Paleontology is Wrong- Episode 1. Out now.
Saw this on Patreon. Well worth the wait.
Seeing Steven prepare a fossil was not expected, but a very, very welcome sight!
Another great video, as always!
Thank you sincerely for this special episode!! The practical aspects of palaeontology are rarely discussed online, especially in such degree of details and practical examples. Bravo!!
Our pleasure! :)
53:59 I don't know what dinosaur medium I watched as a child but this plastering is awakening childhood memories of paleontology.
This is so awesome, thank you! And on location on a dig!
I actually was on a dig, but I was like 7. That was Jack Horner's old "Campasaurus" site, disarticulated Maiasaura bones. I found and partly trenched a femur. Definitely remember using the glue (polyvinyl I think?) on the bone.
Oh wow! We were pretty excited to get to see one for the first time as adults, so that must have been absolutely amazing at 7 years old.
@@YourDinosaursAreWrongIt was great! Spent like three days in the field in tepees (old school 80s tents just blew over), saw where some of the Maiasaura nests were found and taken out, and found fragments of shell at Egg Mountain.
Only downside was that it was a long time ago and being pretty young I didn't get quite as much in depth info as I could as an adult. Though, I was reading Digging Dinosaurs (Jack Horner) on my own... I think my grandmother mentioned that to the dig people, when convincing them to let me come, I was a year or two under the minimum age. But she and my aunt were with me, they weren't going to let me have all the fun by myself.
I'm a paleo student at MSU, and my Lab Methods class just prepped several specimens from the campasaurus site. That material is still mostly in jackets to this day under the Museum of the Rockies.
In 2019 I got the opportunity to do field work with Elevation Science, (at the time, they were named the Big Horn Basin Paleontological Institute.) I learned all this for the first time and got to work with Jason Schein and Jason Poole. It was that expedition that really made me decide to focus on Paleontology as a career. I am now nearly finished with a degree in Paleontology at Montana State University, and I do volunteer work with the Museum of the Rockies as both field crew and preparator.
Really cool to see you getting to work with these guys. This was a great episode. The historiography part of this was very interesting. One thing I did notice, you mentioned Paleo-bond as a Polyvinyl Consolidant, but its actually just a brand name of cyanoacrylate glue. Vinac, Butvar and Paraloid are the current most used consolidants. I mostly know this because this was a test question in my Paleontology Lab Methods class!
That's so awesome! I went out with them this past summer. Do you have any advice about going into paleontology as an undergrad?
@@bearsbigbackyard Volunteer as much as you can. I was lucky I was in the position I was that I had the time available to do so, but the connections you make while volunteering, especially for field work, are key.
Hooray, Liz! Love the little dino hard hat & safety vest, too.
This is the kind of video that if I were a teacher I'd always find a way to show it to a class. It's all so concise, informative and fun. And the field segment was just the icing on the cake! What a wonderful demonstration of one of the most overlooked aspects of paleontology!
Great video. All the custom art made for skeletons, graphs, etc looks amazing as always. YDAW deserves way more than 90k subs.
Thanks Steve and Liz. Was begining to despair but it was worth the wait. For someone who loves a good "how-to" you guys batted it out if the park. 👍
That's very sweet of you to say. Thank you. :)
No way! I just found this channel, but was gutted that the last episode was 7 months ago, I thought the channel was dead so this is an awesome relief
The bag and tag instructions resonate with me! I’m doing a dissertation, and I keep having issues with necessary experimental parameters missing from journal articles. I started writing up a paper essentially “experimental reporting recommendations to facilitate computational modeling” but my prof says that is not a publishable topic. :(
as someone currently on a Dino dig with a site being on a beach - we haul the rock we pull out up the cliff steps in buckets, backpacks if they're too big for buckets. then it's in the boot of a car to take back to the house the crew is crashing at, where we usually process everything. The sites only accessible at low tide, so we can't process the rock on-site. we label each bucket with the date and the order the rock came out of the ground (bucket 1 is first, bucket 2 next, ect) and photograph EVERYTHING so we know how the stone in each bucket is related to the other stone. works well enough
That's so interesting! Are the specimens all on the smaller side so far? Or is it a matter of just having a lot of differently sized buckets to accommodate as needed?
@@YourDinosaursAreWrong our bones are mostly disarticulated and a bit scrappy - nothing big at all. mostly teeth and individual vertebrae and such. we're looking for jawbones, mainly. pretty much everything remains in rock until it's processed back at the house. all out buckets are of like, normal bucket size.
can i just say that i really appreciate that YDAW has started to pay more attention to the colonialism in paleontology and especially early paleontology. too often science and discovery are treated as uncomplicated goods and it's important to recognize the harm that has been done in service of them, even as we celebrate the knowledge we've gained.
Really cute intro!
Love showing the improv aspect of doing stuff in the field.
Also, about the tightness of plastering and wrapping in foil, it reminded me of the Utah palaeontologist (shoutout to Josh Lively) who advised us on our first dig to wrap the plaster "smooth, tight and sexy".
A book I think you'd find interesting about the evolution of museum displays and public engagement in North America is "Life on Display: Revolutionizing U.S. Museums of Science and Natural History in the Twentieth Century" by Karen Rader and Victoria Cain. It's not strictly about dinosaurs and paleontology, but gives a very interesting window into the back rooms of the museums and translating collections from only serving researchers and academics to including public education. One thing that struck me in it is that department store window displays influenced the ways taxidermy animals and fossils were set up and displayed in dioramas. I was reminded of this book while watching this video.
Thank you for showing us the process of jacketing fossils in the field, that was so interesting!
That does sound interesting. I will check it out, thank you!
I always love new YDAW content! Loved the opening!
Glad you enjoyed it!
BTW, this is completely irrelevant to this video, but when it happened I thought of this channel immediately. A couple of days ago I was dubbing 3 pilot episodes of a cartoon with kids and dinosaurs, and one of my parts was a narrator who would describe each dinosaur. I was recording the part about Giganotosaurus and they stopped me to say that it's pronounced the way "gigantic" is. "Oh, no it's not," I said, and pulled up a pronunciation key to prove it. They all looked at each other nervously. Apparently all the other voice talents had recorded already and... They actually made me record both ways and I was not happy about that, making sure to state once again that their dinosaur pronunciation was wrong.
OK, I feel better for having got that off my chest. I love that they were including some scientific information about dinosaurs in a children's cartoon.
thank you for talking about this! feels like an hour passed in a few minutes while i was watching.
I'm so glad!
I'm actually working on a field journal that includes illustrated explanations and resources (including BLM and SVP info) for young paleontologists and hobbyists, and this video was so incredibly spot on perfectly helpful, thank you so much for taking the time to deep dive on this!
I am actually volunteering at my school's museum right now and every summer they host digs over at the Hell Creek Formation. Honestly felt like this video came at the perfect time bc while I already have some hands on experience with the specimens when they get to the prep lab (heard you say acetone-based glue, knew it was paraloid), I'd love to have some kinda understanding of how to jacket them in the field.
This was an amazingly fun and informative video! My lab manager is HUGE on taking the most care of specimens from site to lab so I think she'd love to see this video.
Thanks for always posting grade-A content, you and the team are always a treat! Can't wait for the next video!!!
I'm happy we could be useful! I hope your lab manager enjoys it too. Thank you. :)
You can feel the exasperation in those detailed explanations of how to excavate and pack fossils. Reminds me of my mum giving a detailed tutorial on how to find something she needs from the shed to my little brother lol.
This is the best series on the platform and I'm glad it is running strong after all these years
Aww, thank you!
So what do we need to bribe you and Liz with to bring the opening skits back full time? Best part of the video. Old and new.
I already loved this video with that awkward intro with the crate. The style of these videos are really good.
Thank you! Very kind of you to say. :)
This episode and topic was a lovely change of pase, can't wait for more episodes like it in the future!!
Im so glad this was recommended to me. Every once in a while TH-cam remembers that I love world history and just pulls out a banger (I wholeheartedly recommend History of the Earth to everybody here) and Im just so happy to get to experience it.
26:10 Beeswax was, and still is, a common and easy to acquire hydrophobic material, and until the last century was the most common water proofing substance in use by humans. applying it to a specimen was presumably thus intended to prevent water from reentering the matrix around it, allowing it to hopefully disperse into the aquifer and thus dry out the area, allowing the consolidant to dry.
Oh wow, that's really neat. Thank you!
What a cool episode! I would love more episodes like this tackling a specific topic with field work demonstrations! And as always Steven is so well spoken, I could listen to him for hours.
I just want to say as someone who's loved dinosaurs since i was a kid and grew up on the jurassic park films, reading the Michael Crichton books, I LOVED THIS! Also, as someone with adhd, the amount my brain would love doing all these jackets would be unreal. My hyperfocus would be in overdrive! ❤❤❤❤❤
Those starting bits are the best! They are always such fun!
Really cool to get some more insight and history of a part of paleontology thats not usually portrait to the public! Would really like to see a Part 2 of this about preparation of the specimens :) Great work!
We may or may not be looking into doing one on preparation someday. ;)
I was going to dip out on this episode, but I'm --really-- glad I didn't. The historical information about the field was good, but I didn't expect you to go on on site. Great work!
It's called excelsior for the same reason why it's called a frisbee or a taser - they used to be brand names that became the generic term
I loved this, getting to see a real excavation with a science-focused group who were able to demonstrate the techniques as well as the reasoning behind them... excellent. Loved it!
Glad you enjoyed it! :)
Back in ye old days called "the 90s", there was this Learning Channel series called Paleoworld. In two episodes, we followed Paul Sereno doing Sereno stuff in the Kem Kem Formation, and I think that's the only time (besides this video) where I've seen so much detail about covering and plastering the remains. Good job! :D
Now that you've made a video on the field work of paleontology, it's only fair you make a video on history of the lab work and how they prepare the fossils.
I think that would make for a nice follow-up to the ones we saw being jacketed and transported in this video.
We've already started looking into it! It's very early stages, but definitely plan on having at least one someday.
@@YourDinosaursAreWrong oh hell yeah! Even if it takes a good while to come out, I'm still gonna be looking forward to it. :D
I love the captions provided, that must’ve taken a while for nearly an hour of content but it’s very appreciated
Thanks! We are trying to do better with having those be more accurate than TH-cam's auto-generated ones usually end up being.
@@YourDinosaursAreWrong Thank you so much for doing this! I don't rely on them myself, but I care about the people who do need them, and anyway sometimes they help me too. Maybe someday I will need them? Making things more accessible helps everybody. 🥳🦕🦖
Excellent video! I volunteered with elevation science not to long ago, and one of the bones being prepped in the video was one I uncovered!
That is awesome! We're happy we could help you see its progress. :)
31:07 super cool that you guys got to go to an actual dig site!!!
Great episode! Thanks for taking us along to the quarry!
Really nice to have another YDAW video, and a fascinating insight into the process of actually getting the stuff out of the ground! Great stuff :)
videos like this about the less thought of details of paleontology are so awesome, keep up the great work!
OH HAPPY DAY, MORE YDAW!
awesome video, I was glued the entire time. thanks!
Great to hear!
Very interesting topic. I'm kinda impressed with the quality of the audio of the recording on the field.
This was a really fascinating topic for a video, one I did not expect to see from you guys. I didn’t know a whole lot about the process and it was even cooler seeing you get to participate, that must’ve been a real treat. So awesome that you get to do this stuff.
I do really appreciate this style of video and I really hope we can get a story about the "bone wars" sometime in the future.
Thanks for making this video. Always super interesting to see the early methods of paleontology!
I wanna give this more then one like. The Diggsite visit gave me THE perspective to understand the Pain i've heard about ever since i was 5yo.
I am an archaeoligist, and I actually use clingfoil a lot more than plaster of paris to get artifacts with the matrix in blocks. Only works if you can get the block on a pedestal though.
It's completely understandable you didn't go into the subject in depth but I wanted to say thank you for acknowledging the role of imperialism in the development of paleontology. Scientific progress is often treated as politically neutral or without cost and it's important to recognise that it almost always isn't. Great video as always!
I never really understood how they jacketed fossils. It's always glossed over in any paleontology documentaries along with making coffee, so this was quite interesting.
2:38 its probably supposed to be transporting dinosaurs themselves instead of fossils, more similar to the opening scene in jp
I had a small thought of that as well.
Surprisingly not a lot of documentaries about the process of getting the bones.
So cool seeing the explanation of it being done in the field!
New episode!! Loved this from start to finish as always. So neat to see the techniques on site, thanks for taking us there. I love that this channel has expanded beyond just the toy discussions. I love those episodes too but there’s just so much to talk about in paleontology! Thank you!
This was great and super interesting! I love how you're able to explain things like these easily understandable for laymen like myself. I'd love to see some more videos about the more "behind the scenes" stuff. Also, if you could make a video about the history of paleo art, that would be like the coolest thing ever.
Such a cool video! Your team and you did a great job, loved the in the field part. I'm someone who's used to making plaster, and it's so nice to know about what else it can be used for!
Looking at fossil preparation is such an excellent idea! A very under appreciated aspect of the field. Thank you guys for taking the time to properly document and explain the process.
Babe wake up your dinosaurs are wrong dropped a new episode
the intro was perfection XD
I absolutely loved this type of video! I am certainly a paleo enthusiast and love learning about the biology of the animals, their behavior, etc. But when the videos start getting SUPER heavy on the taxonomy stuff (and how it's always changing!) It gets a bit harder for me to follow and keep up. This type of video was fascinating and I learned a lot!
Anyway, love it, keep up the great work guys!
Glad you enjoyed it! It was super fun to mix it up a tiny bit and focus on something new. :)
nice coverage on jacketing, thank you very much for taking the time.
Could you do a little more in depth on the steps that happen BEFORE jacketing, when you're exposing the fossil itself. I'd also like to know more about the lab prep work and the processes involved there.
This was a totally left field video topic to end up in my TH-cam recommendations feed but I love video deep dives into niche topics and this one was especially fascinating! It was really cool to see the in-the-field examples too 😊
Deep dives are pretty much our favorite thing. Glad you enjoyed it!
This was more interesting than I thought it would be. Thanks.
I'm so excited to see you guys posted again!! The amount of entertainment and education that comes from these productions is so admirable. You guys are one of my favourite TH-cam channels, much love !
Glad it was worth the wait! Thank you so much!
Sorry for the unrelated question, but would you consider making a video on the phylogenetics of the theropod tree? I get most of my information from Wikipedia, but it is often outdated, inconclusive or outright contradictory.
You should check out NCBI, it's a massive database of scientific studies and it's a great source for information.
I can't post links cuz youtube is awful, but I looked up "NCBI therapod phylogenetics" and got several articles!
Phylogeny is full of contradictions, you can never escape them
This might be a good idea to pitch to Clint's Reptiles too; he's an evolutionary biologist and made plenty of phylogeny videos on dinosaurs already
I was so happy to see your video pop up on my yt feed!!! 😁😁😁❤️
I don't normally fancy myself as a human history enjoyer but this was incredibly interesting. A bone wars video is now something I really want to see from you guys!
What a pleasant surprise, a new episode. Greeting from the Netherlands.
Would LOVE a video on the Bone Wars!!!
This episode was SO cool and answered so many questions I hadn't even considered. I love learning about topics other channels haven't covered!
I also laughed and the suspiciously specific packing instructions. I just know crates of fossils arrived at their destination with nothing but dust inside 😂
Antonio had the patience of a saint! I can tell that education is part of this groups work! Very cool video. Good to see Steven getting his hands dirty and doing some field work!
very fun and informative video, I must say that my favourite part was seeing the modern day way of preparing fossils for transportation
Absolutely incredible video. I have no idea where else I would access this information as a broke layman. You guys are awesome.
I'm an undergraduate Earth Science major planning on getting my PhD in Paleontology when I get that far and this video was incredibly interesting and informative, I'd love to see more videos about the Paleontological process in the future! Also I love all of your videos, they're absolutely part of the reason I am getting into this field.
One hour? Damn, thats a nice gift!
I loved this video, watching the fieldwork was phenomenal and entrancing
This episode is a real treat!
Outstanding video! So much interesting stuff I never considered at all. I gained a lot of appreciation for archeologists and the art of the field work they do, and of course, appreciation for this channel.
babe wake up ydaw uploded!
I love this channel so much sm. Love topocs like this because its not something you think about when it comes to pelotology (and others)
Thank you for your efforts!
Lets go!! Excited for a new type of video
How wonderful and interesting this video is. You did a great job and it covers a subject I don't often see with fossil videos. Loved seeing you on site helping with the wrapping of the fossils.🦕💖💖💖
Glad you enjoyed it!