And now for something slightly different

You all deserve a brief respite from the dead fish and Avaceratops update barrage. What better excuse to talk about our big Daspletosaurus Pete III then? It's about the only dinosaur we have that people tend to ask about anyway. We've had an opportunity to catch up on a few projects lately and are able to spend some time in preparing the final few bones from their field jackets, while also restoring the skull bones to get them ready for 3d laser scanning and printing.

Bryan finishing the neural arch of caudal 2

I'm sure you have heard about the special challenges that preparing Pete III poses. I even did a paper on it, which is posted on my academia.edu page. When done, the bone itself is pretty stable, but it just looks somewhat ugly since it's made up of thousands of small fragments. We've adopted a technique using tinted hydrocal to fill in these small surface gaps to help give the bones a little more strength as well as make them look less pixellated (to borrow a term from a friend).

Left jugal after initial prep

Left jugal beginning restoration

Left jugal after finishing

Pixellated right quadratojugal

Much better with plaster

And in further comparison to the size of Pete III vs. Tyrannosaurus rex, here's a teaser comparing the left ectopterygoids of our Daspletosaurus vs a mounted copy of a rex. Not a whole lot of difference there overall.

Can't wait to get finished with this head...