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September 2012

Its September and the Museum is quieting down. It will be closed on Tuesdays and Wednesdays until June now. The summer visitors are leaving and soon the sounds of school groups will echo in our halls. This fall will see a return to Dino fever. Some will rejoice, others will frown. [See below about our Fall exhibit.] I am also missing my summer intern, Becca Payne. She was to keep you posted about the happenings of the Prep Lab and Museum this summer in this blog. It was fun to watch her working in the lab and then telling you about her struggles. I think it helps in the learning process to restate and organize what you just learned, so I hope writing in the blog helped Becca. So I say good-bye to Becca, good luck at Brown, I will miss you, and come back soon! What is new for the Fall? Well, the Museum, moves closer to its 10th anniversary in 2013. Lots of fun things to look forward to with that approaching. In a few months, I will have, which you have endured, been here 1 year. Do I hear party coming up? The new exhibit is opening in a few weeks. "Did Dinosaurs Poop?"

We will be exploring Coprolites and Mesozoic eating habits. It will be a lot of fun for our visiting families AND we get to talk POOP for the next 4 months. WOW! Just think of all the great puns you have been saving up to say. Now is your chance. Also, usually Johanna, being the programs manager for the Museum, designs the activities for the opening Family Day Event. This year, with less Museum staff, it falls to me. I will be looking for a great support from you volunteers to help me on Saturday, September 15th. It will be a "load" of fun. Volunteers, Come to the Volunteer Meeting this Thursday @ 3:30 pm and celebrate my Bday a few days early.Hope to see you soon!

"Manual Labor"

Becca here again~!

So, my main project of the last few weeks has been starting work on a number of standard operating procedures for the Prep Lab-- I've been writing up short little manuals crammed with photos on how to do certain things in the lab, use certain pieces of equipment, and so on. 

So far, there is an SOP for making thin acryloid, turning the air pump in the Maintenance Room on and off, and turning on the camera attached to the stereo microscope. There will be at least a few more on the micro pick and other air scribes, as well as (fingers crossed!) the air abrasive, before the summer's out!

These have been a surprisingly fun project-- while writing up the guides themselves is not hugely dynamic, I'm really enjoying having the chance to learn about various pieces of equipment in the lab in such detail. I have to go through everything to photograph it, so I feel like I really know what I'm doing with some of these procedures now. Which, I suppose, is the point of making these! They can serve as a reference for present and future lab-goers. 

These will probably be printed out in the lab as well as posted on the server, but maybe (with luck) they can even be posted on the desktop computer in the lab for easy access. Who knows? The possibilities are sort of endless with this!

Agwē Update #3

Hi all! Becca again!

So it's been a while since I last updated you all on Agwē, my Green River fish.
I've had a ton of progress on the first three vertebrae, which I'm incredibly excited about. I can actually see them now!

I've been focusing on this area shown here for the last two weeks, once again using hand tools in the form of dental picks. I've also been doing a ton of gluing-- I recently made my own incredibly thin thing acryloid to use on my specimen, since I was discovering that Paleo Bond penetrant stabilizer, while brilliant, was actually losing some of the detail. Even that was still too thick, so I mixed an acryloid that's much more acetone than bead, and I've been impressed with the results so far. It's not as strong of a glue as I'd like, but that's the price I pay for keeping all the detail visible, I suppose!

Now to tackle the rest of the spine. Slowly but surely...

Working Conditions?

I've noticed I seem to have a lot of habits and demands of my workspace while I'm in the lab, some of which make a lot of sense, and some of which make none at all.
For one, I'm fixated on having a clean work area. I like having what tools I'm using organized, I hate it when dust piles up.
I also really hate it when the lab in general is messy, and I'll usually try to clean it before I even start working on my own project if it's at the point where it distracts.
I have a couple dental tools that I almost have to have every time I work, because they're new and wonderful and get stuff done.
Lately, whenever I work on cleaning my Green River fish, I tend to have headphones on, playing music. Oftentimes this is to counteract the sound of an air scribe or just keep me entertained during the interludes between groups of visitors who stop to ask questions (beyond an inquiry for the restrooms). I slide the headphones off whenever visitors come up to the windows, but when I've got nowhere to focus my attentions but my fish, the headphones are on and playing loudly.
I've discovered that it's way too much fun to listen to soundtrack music while cleaning my specimen, because it's very hard to not feel incredibly cool when you've got music from Inception or Lord of the Rings playing as you work away at a slab of fossilized bone and limestone under the microscope. At least it makes every little bit of dust scraped away by the dental tools actually seem significant. Everything is significant to soundtrack music.

Agwē Update #2

Hi all!

Not too much to report on Agwē (my Green River fish) this week; I've spent a large amount of time instead this week writing a "test SOP" on how to make Acryloid B-72 glue. This guide has pictures and required materials and instructions and so on, and I'm really hopeful that making these SOPs for the equipment and various procedures in the lab will be helpful for people working in Prep Lab when they need a reference for how something works or how something is done!
That's the hope, anyway. I'm optimistically looking forward to seeing how this comes together.
But in any case, that did take up a lot of time and limited my attention to Agwē. Still! I managed to unearth the first vertebrae and the surrounding area almost completely, which is really exciting! He might actually have a visible spine before the summer's out (man, I hope so)!

I've decided to proceed without using any sort of acid on the limestone-- I think I'd like to, but I just don't know how it'd work, so we'll have to see how using the dental tools works on the very hard-to-reach places along the spine and ribs.
And, I have to test out my new super, super thin Acryloid! Paleo Bond was looking too thick, so I mixed my own glue in the hopes of better preserving the detail on the bones. Fingers crossed!

~Becca

Becca here again!

Really alternatingly busy week in Prep Lab! Biggest part of my week was actually dedicated to the Scanning Electron Microscope, which was in use this past Wednesday-- not by me, obviously (wah), but by the Institute.
However! My role in the use of the SEM was purely custodial, in getting the lab ready to roll by dusting it down so the microscope didn't suffer any damage via wayward miscreant dust. I decided this merited cleaning the lab within an inch of its metaphorical life and spent a large chunk of Tuesday dusting, scrubbing, sweeping, and vacuuming. It's actually insane how much dust there was in odd places like on top of cabinets and on the sides of things like the dust collector (irony upon irony). Then again, it's amazing how much dust gets kicked up in here in one day's worth of work-- as I can see right now, two days after cleaning the lab, with it already looking as dusty as if I'd never cleaned up.
Oh well. More to clean?
So to all of you amazing volunteers who take it upon themselves to help keeping the museum looking beautiful-- you guys are totally awesome. Because it is so much work.
But I take a very weird sort of pride in making the Prep Lab look good, so then again, I suppose I don't actually mind at all.