Disassembling a large jacket

As many of you know, we had to remove our big Daspletosaurus, Pete 3, in 75 different jackets. Jacket RMDRC 06-005-72 was done with a pallet method, weighing in at 4 tons. Paper here on the process.

This week we are making a concerted effort to take that enormous jacket apart, in hopes of keeping it stable as well as recovering a large section of real estate smack dab in the center of the lab. Unfortunately, some bones are going to have to be broken or cut to "unjackstraw" them, but will be reassembled later. The jackstrawed nature of the bones (as well as their fragility) is what made us remove the huge block in the first place, so it's not like it's a huge surprise. Still, it is a lot of work.

BCT is finished!

BCT, our large Daspletosaurus that was excavated from 2001 to 2003 from a very very very hard sandstone in eastern Montana is now finished with prep. Paleo teach Jacob Jett finished the last dorsal vertebra, that was encased in a big ugly block of ironstone concretion. I'm just happy I didn't have to work on that!

Next up is restoration and molding. Stay tuned!