2016, Liverpool:

Talks:

• Psycho knives and Withers wedges – Excavating a plesiosaur. Richard Forrest.
• Moulding, casting and laser scanning of dinosaur trackways from the Late Cretaceous of Southern Alberta, Canada. Donald Henderson.
• Part seen, part remembered: the preparation, conservation and curatorial challenges of virtually raising Leviathan. Jeff Liston.
• Preparation of vertebrate fossils from the Miocene clay pit in Gram, Denmark. Frank Osbaeck
• A documentation mystification. Emma Nicholls.

Posters:

• A ton of trouble: cleaning, conserving and mounting a large 300 million year old giant clubmoss plant fossil from north Wales for display. Nigel Larkin & Caroline Buttler.
• The discovery in a museum collection of the largest known skeleton of Ichthyosaurus in the world and its re-display, including 3D printing missing bones. Nigel Larkin, Dean Lomax, Steven Dey, Luanne Meehitiyia & Laura Porro.
• Journal of Palaeontological techniques: a free, open access journal exchanging knowledge between technicians, preparators and researchers. Emanuel Tschopp & Femke Holwerda

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PSYCHO KNIVES AND WITHERS WEDGES - EXCAVATING A PLESIOSAUR

Richard Forrest

Plesiosaur.com

The fossil of a juvenile Cryptoclidus was found by Darren Withers on a field trip to Must Farm Quarry organised by the Peterborough Museum on Saturday 25th June 2016. The excavation of the specimen had to be organised at short notice because of the risk of unauthorised collectors looting the site, and time constraints because of its location in a working pit. A detailed plan of action was drawn up with Peterborough Museum, and agreed by Fortera, the brick-making company who own the pit. The excavation was carried out over three days, from Wednesday 29th to Friday 1st July. It is in the nature of any such excavation that some data is lost, and careful records need to be made to reduce this. The approach usually adopted in such excavations is to trace the outline of individual bones on a plastic sheet laid over the area. This failed because the first full day of excavation was carried out in steady rain, and it was impossible to trace outlines on wet plastic. Photogrammetry was used to record the excavation area at various stages of excavation, which provides a scalable 3-D model of the disposition of the bones. In addition, photographs were taken of each element in situ with a marker tile recording a unique number and recorded in a log book. This has proved to be very successful. The specimen is now in Peterborough Museum where volunteers are cleaning and conserving the material.

MOULDING, CASTING AND LASER SCANNING OF DINOSAUR TRACKWAYS FROM THE LATE CRETACEOUS OF SOUTHERN ALBERTA, CANADA

Donald Henderson

Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

During the summer of 2015 latex peels were made in the field to record exceptional sets of dinosaur footprints from the Late Cretaceous St. Mary River Formation in southwestern Alberta. The peels were done to avoid the logistical nightmare of trying to recover the multi-tonne sandstone blocks that hosted the trackways from the bottom of high, steep river banks. With the peels successfully returned to the Museum we were able to make thin, strong casts of the peels to form a permanent record for housing in the Museum collections and for potential future exhibits. Very broad (2m wide, 3-4m long), but shallow (8cm deep) boxes were constructed from plywood and 2x4s for each of the peels. The dimensions of the boxes were such that the peel was able to lie perfectly flat, with only a small margin extending beyond their perimeters. As the peels were made on irregular, non-planar rock surfaces, a layer of sand was placed in the bottom of a box to provide continuous and easily adjustable support of the latex sheet to prevent it warping when the moulding materials were applied. Aqua resin was used to make the actual cast of the tracks, while fibreglass reinforced plaster was used as a rather dense, but very strong, backing, so only a thin layer would be required. Given the very shallow, eroded nature of many of the tracks, laser-scanning of the trackway casts was done to produce digital elevation models to possibly aid visualisation, but with mixed results.

A TON OF TROUBLE: CLEANING, CONSERVING AND MOUNTING A LARGE 300 MILLION-YEAR OLD GIANT CLUBMOSS PLANT FOSSIL FROM NORTH WALES FOR DISPLAY.

Nigel R. Larkin¹ and Caroline Buttler²

1 - Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, 2 - National Museum Wales

In 2004 a large and exceptionally well preserved Late Carboniferous giant clubmoss comprising a tall trunk and broad Stigmaria root structure was discovered in a newly exposed fossil forest site in an old steel works at Brymbo near Wrexham, North Wales. Cleaning, conserving and safely mounting the whole fossil for exhibition in 2016 was not easy as the specimen was in 90 pieces, weighed almost a ton and stood 2.25 m tall with a root span of 3.5 m. Also, as the specimen was to be displayed in various locations over time and would have to be dismantled and transported, a modular mount able to be easily assembled and dissembled was required. The mount was made in sections from welded steel lined with Plastazote foam, with robust lockable wheels underneath the main trunk. As the two uppermost sections of the trunk weighed approximately a quarter of a ton each, to reduce risk to the specimen and to people undertaking the mounting they were moulded and painted casts were mounted in their place. Large Carboniferous Stigmaria root systems associated with trunks are rare and few are on display. This specimen has proved to be a popular exhibit in Wrexham. The mounting system is strong but not too intrusive. The brackets supporting the roots have the appearance of rootlets that would have existed in life. It is fitting that the structure is created from steel, the material made for over a century on the heritage site where the fossil was discovered.

THE DISCOVERY IN A MUSEUM COLLECTION OF THE LARGEST KNOWN SKELETON OF ICTHYOSAURUS IN THE WORLD AND ITS RE-DISPLAY, INCLUDING 3D-PRINTING MISSING BONES.

Nigel R. Larkin¹, Dean R. Lomax², Luanne Meehitiya³ and Steven Dey⁴

1 - Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, 2 - The University of Manchester, 3 - Thinktank Science Museum, 4 - ThinkSee3D Ltd

In 1955, a partial ichthyosaur skeleton was excavated from Lower Jurassic deposits in Warwickshire. Unusually for Lower Jurassic specimens, the skull bones largely retained their three-dimensional integrity and the skull was mounted for display at Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. A recent conservation project to dismantle the skull and rebuild it more accurately involved micro-CT scanning some of the skull elements, mirroring the data, and printing accurate 3D models to replace carved pieces of wood that previously represented missing elements on one side of the skull. This process digitally recorded the bones for future research before replacing them within the skull. Whilst investigating the history of the specimen and looking for missing pieces the postcranial material, which was separated from the skull a long time ago, was rediscovered. Research revealed that this specimen can be identified as an Ichthyosaurus. With an estimated lower jaw length of 87 cm it is the largest example of the genus so far recorded. Therefore the entire skeleton was cleaned and conserved for display. To help visitors to understand the skeleton, missing portions of the postcranial skeleton were recreated. The left forelimb and pectoral girdle bones were CT scanned, the data mirrored, and the bones for the right side 3D-printed. The same process was undertaken for missing portions of the rear limbs. Missing vertebrae were represented by casts of adjacent vertebrae. The skeleton is now the centerpiece of the new permanent Marine Worlds gallery at Thinktank, including an interactive focused on the conservation.

PART SEEN, PART REMEMBERED: THE PREPARATION, CONSERVATION AND CURATORIAL CHALLENGES OF VIRTUALLY RAISING LEVIATHAN

Jeff Liston ^1,2 and Glenys Wass ²

1 - National Museums Scotland, 2 - Peterborough Museum & Art Gallery

Over field seasons 2002 and 2003, the most complete specimen of the Middle Jurassic suspension-feeding fish Leedsichthys was excavated from the Star Pit, just outside Whittlesey, Peterborough. Over 100 days of excavation involving over 3,100 staff hours extracted over 2,300 parts, making it the longest dig for a single vertebrate specimen in Europe. The specimen was registered and deposited at Peterborough Museum and Art Gallery, and over the ensuing years over 11,750 hours of preparation time was applied to it by Alan Dawn and his team of volunteers in the palaeo lab. Specimens ranged in scale from gigantic plaster jacket slabs 1-2 metres in length, to 7x10cm ziplock bags of fragments. In between there were tissue-wrapped slabs of the excavation surface (taken from the field for time efficiency reasons), and bags bulging with individual gill rakers. Many of these specimens were prepared over this time, the clay prepared away, Paraloid B72 anointing the fragments to heal the fractures, and fibreglass jackets made to support these most fragile yet long bones.

Preparation work was only interrupted from 2010-2012 for the closure of the museum for a full redisplay. In July 2015, the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund (via the Museums Association) awarded a £65K grant to Vivacity-Peterborough to provide full curation of the specimen with a ‘virtual display’. This was a key consideration: with new displays, there was no physical space to add a full display of this specimen – even if the building had had a gallery large enough to do so.

A DOCUMENTATION MYSTIFICATION

Emma-Louise Nicholls and Joanne Hatton

Horniman Museum and Gardens

The Horniman Museum’s Study Collections Centre houses the fossil collection of Walter Bennett, an early to mid-20th Century geologist, who collected much of the material himself. The collection was acquired from the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society in the 1980s, and comprises approximately 175,000 specimens housed in 57 wooden cabinets. Whilst much of the fossil material was found in the UK, more prominent sites are also represented such as the Solnhofen limestone and the Burgess Shale. Its composition is around ¼ vertebrate and ¾ invertebrate, with fish, molluscs, and coral being well represented. The collection has been recognised as an important one that needs to be properly documented. The collection arrived with stratigraphy and locality, but varying levels of taxonomic identification. No numbering system existed however. In the 1990s a documentation project resulted in improved identifications and several folders of A4 hand written records, later transferred onto a database. To complicate matters further, accession numbers were allocated to these electronic records but not the specimens. Most recently a volunteer has spent five herculean years going through each drawer making an inventory of its contents on a spreadsheet. As the new Deputy Keeper of Natural History I am tasked with collating data from each of these four sources and numbering the specimens with unique numbers to tie the data together on the collections management database to make it accessible. With further complications yet to be explained, advice on the most efficient way of going about this would be welcome.

PREPARATION OF VERTEBRATE FOSSILS FROM THE MIOCENE CLAYPIT IN GRAM DENMARK

Frank Osbæck

Museum Sønderjylland

The clay pit in Gram is of Upper Miocene age and is mostly known for its whale fossils. Besides a large invertebrate fauna it offers a rich insight into the Miocene vertebrate fauna with sharks, birds, tortoises, seals and Whales. During the last couple of months I have been working on a Stingray barb section, two bird “bones” and a tooth whale lower jaw which will be scientifically described when the preparation has been finished. The preparation of the fossils are mostly quite straightforward scalpel and dental tool work, as the dried clay is relatively easily cut but extremely fragmented. The basic problem is the pyrite, both in the clay prone to pyrite decay but also the pyrite encrusting the fossils themselves. On the dried clay water is not an option, so mechanical removal with the help of Acetone and Paraloyd B72 is used. The bones are partly perfectly preserved, smooth and fine, partly a grainy mess which tends to disintegrate if you just “look” at it. All together, business as usual.

I hope to give a little insight into the world of preparing Miocene fossils, seen through the eye of the Preparator (and his camera).

JOURNAL OF PALEONTOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES: A FREE, OPEN ACCESS JOURNAL EXCHANGING KNOWLEDGE BETWEEN TECHNICIANS, PREPARATORS AND RESEARCHERS

Emanuel Tschopp ^1,2,3 & Femke Holwerda ^2,3,4

1 - Università di Torino, 2 - Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 3- Museu da Lourinhã, 4 - Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie

The Journal of Paleontological Techniques (JPT) was established in 2006 in the Museu da Lourinhã (ML), Portugal, as a means to provide a platform for preparators of the ML to share ideas and knowledge with their peers. After this, it grew to be an open access, free journal, publishing mostly on the collecting, preparation, conservation, and exhibition of natural history objects, such as holotypes of extant species, fossils, and historical museum specimens. These natural history objects provide a wealth of information on past and present biodiversity. Because collection and/or conservation techniques might alter the objects in ways that could negatively influence the outcomes of future research, a detailed report of the methodologies used from acquisition to conservation of specimens is crucial. Despite the importance of such reports, until recently, no specific scientific publications existed for museum technicians and scientists to share knowledge between each other.

The Journal of Paleontological Techniques publishes a wide variety of articles, ranging from excavation reports and papers on preparation techniques to new methodologies in collection management and scientific study, among others. Manuscripts are subjected to peer-review to ensure scientific standards. Papers are published as single-paper volumes upon final approval of the proofs, and are available as .pdf under a CC-BY license.

The editorial board currently consists of an international group of early-stage scientists. Most editors have a palaeontological background, however, all have a unique expertise within that field (e.g. microscopy, photogrammetry, phylogeny, morphometrics, preparation, and microbiology). JPT welcomes your submissions!