Project Kevin Part 2: The Kevining

Project Kevin is complete (for now, we have to invent a body and that might be... interesting)! The last time I updated this, I had left you at "We dug stuff up and were making it as pretty as it could be" in the lab. That left us with a pile of neat looking bones, but of course we wanted more. Did we have enough to make a skull? And if so, what did it look like? We sure thought we did based on what we identified, though since the site was trampled int he Cretaceous most bones were missing chunks.

One of the mostly complete brow horns

First things first though. Let's laser scan (alright not a laser, but an Artec Spider structured light scanner) all the things! This gives us a good baseline to record what we have. These scans can also be shared with interested researchers across the planet. Researchers are usually pretty happy giving opinions of things and many helped us with details on how this thing might come back together.

Right maxilla in digital form

We can also try out new things with the scans. I came up with an interesting idea to print a 30% scale model of all the parts (using mirrored parts if one side was missing or just incomplete/really ugly). We popped off the parts on our Formlabs Form2 (the 30% scale was determined by the size of the build plate of the printer, these SLA printers can be pretty small) and tried to put together a model to guide us. We goofed though.

The first draft, complete with all our errors

Turns out we had the brow horns on backwards. Also the fits between the bones weren't as accurate as we would have liked. So we fixed them on a small scale before committing on the casts and prints of the full scale stuff. It also gave us the ability to try out things like a scaled and computationally-squished rostrum to make a part that we were completely missing. In this case we printed out a bunch of different possibilities and fit them on until we had a result that looked plausible.

Second draft of scale model, now we get to try out different beaks

With this information in hand, 4 binders of papers as references and a pile of casts, we were ready to take a stab at reconstructing the skull. Lainie and Grace really did a heck of a job learning these techniques. Printing out full size mirrored parts make the skull more accurate and easier to reassemble than if we were to sculpt the missing bits from scratch.

3D prints, casts, lots of epoxy putty and Bondo. Lainie for scale

Things went pretty smoothly till someone (who shall remain nameless) suggested our minimum length conservative frill was probably much too short. The first draft was based only on the length of the frill parts that were preserved. Chasmosaurines like this have seriously long frills though so we took their advice and busted out the sawzall. It was only plastic after all.

OK, let's move this frill about a foot to the back I really think it looks better this way.

We also had to make teeth. Hydrospan 100 was wonderful for this. We poured it into a mold of Ava (RMDRC 12-020)'s dentary and made a floppy cast. This material was then soaked in water until it expanded enough to fit the tooth rows for Kevin. Then we molded it, poured a bunch of plastic copies and played dinosaur dentist for a few days getting over 100 rows of teeth in all the jaws.

We molded all the finished parts and made casts. The skull was cut apart to make the molding process easier. A single mold for the top of the skull would have been huge, complicated and really heavy.

This is what a Kevin skull kit would contain if you bought one

Grace and Lainie making a huge mold for the frill

We put the prototype together in just a few days. It was a lot bigger than we expected. But after paint and finishing, I thought it went together pretty well! Technology really helped us out on this one, saving us materials, time and most importantly effort. I don't think we could have gotten it done by the deadline without it. Now it's time to figure out where this belongs in the family tree.

The prototype is done!

And the obligatory "Curator for scale" photo. I forgot to suck in my gut.

Here's what we put together for the left side, and where we got it from.

Project Kevin Part 1: Field and Lab Work

The astute social media observers among you may have noticed our new ceratopsian whose skull restoration was just finished in time for its debut at Tucson. Here's how we got it there in 2 parts. Today: the hot and nasty work.

Yep, that's hot

The site was originally discovered in the summer of 2017 by one of our landowners, rancher buddies and all around good guy Larry in the upper Judith River Formation of central Montana. We located a partial humerus, a lot of ribs and several vertebrae exposed on the erosional surface right away. The entire deposit was constricted to about 15cm (6 inches) of highly concreted sandstone, and from the exposed highly eroded elements we could tell it was from an ornithischian of some flavor. Odds were it was probably an incomplete scattered duckbill in fairly difficult to work matrix, so we decided to keep scouting and come back later.

The site is very remote but also gorgeous

That later turned out to be the summer of 2018. It was hot. Really hot. Continued scouting in that area turned up some pretty neat lag deposits but not a whole lot of good skeletal material. It was time to bite the bullet and see what the old duckbill site was going to give us. Who knows, there might be a skull in there.

Digging begins. We love our shade tents.

Sometimes we get visitors to the site

With 4 people digging we made some good progress on the first day of the dig. Around lunchtime I had moseyed on up to the top of a nearby bluff to get cell signal to call home to the boss and give him an update on how we weren't finding anything great out there and might relocate our scouting locality to somewhere closer to camp. Coming back to the site I ran into Jacob who was looking for me to let me know we had "the weirdest duckbill he's ever seen" in the quarry.

That ain't no duckbill horn.

Grace had found a brow horn.

Lainie demonstrates proper air hammer technique.

So, not a duckbill (though to be fair we did find some scattered hadrosaur material at the site). We dug more that week finding much more skull material, but had to come home for resupply and other projects. We got smart during trip #2 and brought out some diesel powered earth moving equipment as the overburden went from practically zero to nearly 3 meters very quickly. Again more skull material was found. There was some postcrania too but we all know that ceratopsian postcrania is pretty much worthless, right?

Bobcat good, getting hit by 2 dust devils in a row bad for shade tents

After the 3rd trip, the bone was very sparse along all edges of the excavation and we were pretty confident to call the dig finished.

Headed home with a load of jackets. Rock Chalk!

Lab work began right away. There were a few tricky bits getting the nasty concretion off the bones but for the most part they came out looking pretty good. Once cleaned up we got a much better idea of what parts of the skull we had (field identifications are always tentative). It also became pretty obvious the skeleton was trampled by other very inconsiderate dinosaurs way back in the cretaceous, as we had many broken bones with no parts to go back with them.

Right brow horn, missing some parts, but we can fix that.

Bone quality was pretty good and we ended up with most of the skull, quite a bit of the neck, some dorsal vertebrae and ribs, and curiously a random chunk of pubis.

Detail of jugal edge. Beautiful bone texture.

Stay tuned for the next installment where we show how we went from a pile of bones to a completed skull restoration in 100 easy steps!

Pete III Final Update: In Its Forever Home

This post has been a long time coming. A little over 13 years from when we first dug a hole in the ground for a toe fragment in Central Montana, our giant Daspletosaurus sp. "Pete III" is now on permanent display at the Cincinnati Museum Center! A photo of Pete's metatarsal was prominently featured in my first blog post here way back in 2010. We put over a decade into excavating, preparing, scanning, molding, casting and assembling this specimen (click these links to go directly to the older content). I'm happy that it's finally done, but I'm kinda sad to see it go all the same.

The original hole in the ground, field season 2005

The first ugly toe. It got better.

You can search all those old posts on the blog for progress, but now I'd like to share with you the finished product! We mounted all of the original bones (minus the skull, those bones are still loose and in the collections in Cincinnati) on an external steel armature with removable brackets so that anything that needs to be taken off of display for research can easily be done. Daspletosaurus is much more rare than "boring old" Tyrannosaurus rex so the research value of this specimen should be high.

Copies of this ungual can be purchased at www.deeptimefossils.com

The mount itself is a fairly conservative pose, not really running, not really mouth-wide-open. Viewed from near the Allosaurus, it seems to tower over the city skyline (hold the Chili). The restored art deco hall that Pete III now calls home is an exhibit itself and was very well done.

I really like this shot

We tried to make the supporting steel as visually unobtrusive as possible while still being substantial enough to do its job of holding up hundreds of pounds of real bone (and quite a bit of super glue). There might just be as much steel by weight as original bone in this mount, but it really doesn't feel like it.

Every bone gets its own personal mounting steel support

We're really happy how this mount turned out and now all you tyrannosaur researchers out there know who to talk to about planning a visit and publishing. No more excuse to pretend it doesn't exist anymore! And if you notice, things look "unfinished" in the photographs. This is because I helped install it back in August, so if you have better pictures of the display from your next visit I'd love to see them! Here's to thousands and thousands of visitors liking this specimen just as much as we do!

The finished mount, curator for scale

An even better photo without the curator

Pete's huge (as far as tyrannosaurs go) arm

Digging a tyrannobutt

We're back from Montana waiting for the temperatures and fire danger to die down for a bit. Earlier this month though we were battling the gnats working on excavating a dinosaur I found late last summer.

Can you spot the site?

The site is pretty typical for how I find them: about halfway up a 30 foot cliff with a menacing hoodoo overhanging the specimen. I found this site about 2 days before we broke camp last year so I was only able to do the smallest of evaluation digs on it.

Bones on either side of an erosional notch: usually a good sign

 Using air tools I was able to notch out a few of the bones. These were clearly large theropod bones, one looked like a caudal vertebra and I couldn't tell what the one shooting straight into the cliff was. Big theropod in the Judith River formation means one thing: Tyrannosaur! I knew I'd be coming back for this site in 2017.

Duckbills. It had to be duckbills

Additionally at this site was a big wad of predepositionally broken ornithischian (most likely duckbill) bones under the tyrannosaur material. This gave the impression of a stream or oxbow lake bottom assemblage, but sometimes you find good skeletons mixed in with all this material. Unfortunately with fall closing in, I had to abandon the site till 2017.

Storms are no fun in vehicles that lack roofs and windshields

This year however we came out with our big jackhammer and managed to notch out a decent sized evaluation pit. I wanted to get a better feeling for what was present before I suggested getting a bulldozer out there to knock down the whole cliff.

The isolated tyrannobutt

Turns out, it appears it was just an isolated tyrannosaur sacrum with one dorsal vertebra still attached. Not pretty now, but once I prepare it we will see better the shape of the specimen. I'm thinking Albertosaurus, but it's hard to say from this element.

Closeup of the spines. Bonus duckbill chevron at top left

It's a bit of a bummer that there wasn't more of this skeleton. It was going in towards the head but it was just not meant to be. I'm happy to find this now before we invested time and resources removing 15 feet of really tough sandstone from the area though. Guess I'll just have to spend the rest of my summer looking for more dinosaurs. It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it!

It's field season again

Wandering around Montana means lack of blog updates, but we're at least finding a few new dinosaurs. Here's a few good pictures from our first trip out to the badlands. Back out soon to work a few hadrosaur and ceratopsian sites in the blistering heat.

Big mother wolf spider with the kiddos

Dinosaurs hide everywhere

Jacob and I load a huge (4 foot plus) duckbill tibia into the truck

Sometimes the dinosaurs hide really well

Curatorial boot for scale, another duckbill site

Sometimes geology needs to be shown who's boss with power tools.

Everyone loves a little tail

Or even a huge one. Just wanted to share some cool pics we took of Pete III's 5.1m long (17 foot) tail. Caudal 1 is missing from this layout (it was still in the pelvis jacket), so add on another 18cm or so.

Not too shabby

Jacob, our living 2m scalebar

The Fossil Brewing Company shirt is apt

Avaceratops Skull Resto

Cast mount of the holotype Avaceratops in Philadelphia

So after a year and a half of digging and preparation, what do you do with a big pile of bones? Put them together! At long last, our Avaceratops project is moving forward and is surprisingly starting to look like something. Avaceratops is a fairly poorly known animal, with only 2 partial and fragmentary skulls discovered before this one. Ours is filling in lots of gaps since 1: we have more bones than were known before and 2: the bones that we have are more or less complete, not busted up. This adds a degree of difficulty to the project since all the restorations done before made a few educated assumptions about their missing bits, and not all of those were accurate.

An older bone map of the skull bones we thought we recovered, based on an image by Scott Hartmann

Jaw bones both real and 3d printed

Where to start though? In treating this like a giant model kit, we first decided to make all the parts we needed. There will be 60 individual bones to deal with. While we have the lions share of those, we do not have them all. The first step is to mold all the original elements and cast them in plastic. This enables us to mount them and take distortion out without destroying any of the real fossil. Second we identified all the elements that we had one side of and needed the other. Those elements were laser scanned, mirror imaged in software, then printed out in plastic on one of our 3d printers. Lastly, some elements were flat out missing. Those were fortunately few, but they ended up getting sculpted.

So, let's begin with some parts. Boot for scale

Once the parts were poured, we cut apart a few casts where the bones were glommed together and it was too dangerous to try to pry the fossils apart. After fitting a few parts, some needed to get cut or bent to fit how they were supposed to, taking millions of years of crushing and distortion out. This is much trickier than it sounds. Our frontals were squished just enough in the ground that when the brow horns were attached to the mount, the tips crossed each other. That's probably not how they went in life. The casts were then adhered together into subassemblies ready for molding.

Where we are today.

Work is still ongoing but we hope to be done in the next week or so with the heavy work. Once the molding is done, the final product will be just 5 parts. Much easier to put together than 60.

Stangerochampsa: Weird Hell Creek Croc

Last thanksgiving when I was in Illinois visiting family, I got to take a day to visit the Burpee Museum in Rockford, IL. While there I got to pick up molds and original bones from one of their discoveries from the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana. Ernie is a small alligatoroid, apparently related to the much more common Brachychampsa. I never seem to be able to complete any vacation without becoming some sot of fossil transporter, however it gives me a chance to see a lot of new places along the way.

In any case, we've spent the past few months working on the specimen. It was pretty complete as far as Hell Creek crocs go (which isn't saying much, though if you saw the poster on the specimen at SVP last year, you have a pretty good idea) but it needed some parts badly.

Skull bones getting molded

The first thing we did was remold the individual skull bones and any other originals. Using the molds provided by Burpee we poured casts of the postcranial elements as well. In the end we had a nice skull and less than half of a body. How do we improve on that?

Donor gator, tail skilfully removed for shipping

Donor gator of course! Dr. Ray Wilhite from Auburn University was able to get us a 49 inch long frozen Alligator mississippiensis. It was a great day in the lab when the package arrived, not even oozing at all! Jacob and I did a dissection on it to see how things move on recent animals, then stripped most of the muscles and skin off of it before sending it to the dermestid beetle colony for final cleaning. The skin, especially the osteoderms were a lot more difficult to remove than we had originally planned.

Processing through, those jaw muscles give me nightmares

While the beetles were chewing away at the smelliest part of the gator, Jacob restored the missing bits of the casts of the original material. Missing neural spines and transverse processes were sculpted. When we got the modern bones back, they were disassembled and molded. Where possible we incorporated any part of Ernie into the restored bones.

Ernie's coming for you!

I especially like the shadow

Once remolded, assembly was pretty straightforward. The prototype was completed this week and will be headed back to Rockford for display in the upcoming brand new "Homer's Odyssey" exhibit in a very shortly!