Before a Tyrannosaurus rex can tower over museum visitors or a Triceratops can display its massive horns, dinosaur fossils must first be painstakingly reconstructed, cleaned, assembled and even painted.
For American restorationist Lauren McClain, the process is like piecing together a giant 3D puzzle.
McClain’s work begins in her home studio near Houston, Texas, where she uses a small drill with an air compressor, similar to a dentist’s tool, to carefully remove clinging remains from more than 60 million years ago. dirt on.
She must then assemble the ancient puzzle, although pieces are almost always missing.
She creates fillings for missing parts, plugs holes and repairs the notches that have appeared over millions of years on Edmontosaurus femurs or megalodon teeth. She has even studied fossils of Eurypterida, or sea scorpions, from 200 million years ago.
McLean doesn’t actually like puzzles that much, she said.
But when it “turns into a dinosaur… I can solve the puzzles,” the 33-year-old said.
“When you get something that’s made up of a hundred pieces, you really have to study all those edges and how they line up, and really, really hone in on those details to rebuild it back to what it was originally,” McLean explained. ”
Many of the giants McLean recreates once roamed the lands of what is now the United States, from Florida in the southeast to Montana and the Dakotas in the north and California in the west.
McClain has been a fan of “Jurassic Park” since she was a kid, and she’s a dinosaur fan. She even got married at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, home to several dinosaur skeleton recreations.
While working as a graphic designer, McLean began joining fossil digs a few years ago and, with the help of several professional paleontologist mentors, started his own restoration business called Big Sky Fossils.
Seven months ago, she quit her office job to focus on the company full-time.
Lately, McLean has been working on the cranium of a pachycephalosaurus that belongs to a Texas museum, and while looking for more space to expand her studio, she’s been restoring a hadrosaur femur in her garage, almost As big as she is.
First, she inserted a metal rod into the massive thigh bone for stability. Next, she cleaned it thoroughly and used strong glue to glue everything together. Then, use epoxy putty to fill in any gaps where the fossil fragments have fallen out. Finally, McLean painted all new parts the same color as the original parts.
“Recovering the missing parts from fossils, that’s often the hardest part,” McLean said.
“Because not only do you need to know the anatomy of a particular dinosaur, but you also need a good reference.”
“I talked to a lot of paleontologists to get the results right,” she added.
David Temple, curator of paleontology at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, said the movie led viewers to believe that dinosaur fossils were dug out of the ground intact.
“But in reality, that’s not the case at all,” he explained.
“Every fossil that is discovered needs some level of stewardship, some level of restoration, some level of consolidation, because even the act of digging it out of the ground is destructive,” Temple said in the museum’s Cretaceous period part said.
Once restored, the original fossils are also used to create lifelike replicas so that multiple versions of the same model can be displayed in multiple locations at the same time.
“Many paleontologists prepare their own fossils, but they don’t all do that,” Temple said. “A lot of times they recognize that the person doing it has a very specialized skill set.”
Sometimes, when bones that don’t quite fit are glued together, paleontologists and restorationists joke that they’ve invented “a new species,” he said.
“Patience is very important. Observation is also very important,” he added.
Above all, Temple said, the restoration needs to be done with care.
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