Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work behind the Scenes

Preparing Dinosaurs The Work behind the Scenes For Eleanor Joan Bollinger Donahue

Acknowledgments

This book is a study of how people and nature come together to create knowledge. The people who welcomed me into their labs and their lives made this book and my career possible, and also made learning from them a pleasure. This journey began with the wise professionals at the University of Chicago and London's Natural History Museum, who patiently taught me how to scrape away matrix and glue breaks, and to unglue my fingers: Sara Burch, Tyler Keillor, Bob Masek, and Scott Moore-Fay. Paul Sereno and Chris Carter let me prepare fascinating fossils and meet fascinating preparators in their labs. Later, the expert preparators named here as "Jay," "Kevin," "Amanda," and "Carla" hosted me as an ethnographer at their museums for several weeks. They embraced my presence and my questions with patience, kindness, and open-mindedness. Countless other research workers talked with me, showed me around their labs, and filled out my survey. Their names are absent in this book, but their ideas and experiences are the heart of it.

This book is also a tool to prepare a scholar (me). The community that has trained me in its mysterious rituals of making knowledge is generous, brilliant, and kind. Its members are too many to name here, but they know who they are, and I hope that they know how grateful I am. My PhD supervisor, Jim Secord, still grins while pointing out when my work "isn't quite prepared out of the rock yet" and where to "dig" to make it better. Fortunately for me, he continues to provide wise and enthusiastic advice, even though I am no longer his responsibility. He and many other professors and students at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge showed me how to be a scholar, such as how to integrate multiple disciplines, how to ask questions in seminars, how to write publishable papers, and how to teach. I strive to follow their admirable examples. Likewise, the enthusiastic and optimistic scholars I met during my formative four months at Berlin's Max Planck Institute for the History of Science inspired me to write a book. David Sepkoski invited me there as a postdoc and has been a tireless mentor ever since.

Many listeners and readers have improved the ideas in this book. I received particularly astute knowledge from audiences at talks I gave at the Max Planck Institute, the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago, the Egenis Centre at the University of Exeter, the Field Methods workshop at the University of Virginia, and many meetings of the Society for the Social Studies of Science. Among many generous readers, the following experts provided invaluable insights on chapters at key moments and sometimes across several drafts: Michael Barany, Katy Barrett, Ira Bashkow, Bernie Carlson, Adrian Currie, Fiona Greenland, Sabina Leonelli, Lisa Messeri, Josh Nall, Nicole Nelson, Gwen Ottinger, Allison Pugh, Beth Reddy, Robin Scheffler, Kelley Swain, and the many anonymous reviewers who have commented on this manuscript and my other publications. Katie Helke and her team at the MIT Press believed in this book and its author, as they demonstrated through their excellent advice and hard work. This book would never have been written and my life would be much diminished without the friendship, empathy, and powerful presence of my writing buddies, especially Alison Lefkovitz, Emily McTernan, and the UVA Faculty Writing Group.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology took a chance by hiring me as a not-quite-official PhD, giving me the honor of learning how to teach by working with their wonderful students. The University of Virginia invested in me as a researcher as well as an educator. What a privilege it is to work alongside inspiring colleagues and students. In particular, the wise mentorship of Ira Bashkow, Bernie Carlson, Mike Gorman, Kay Neeley, and Nancy Steffen-Fluhr has made all the difference.

My parents, Ken Wylie and Dr. Mavis Donahue, have provided unquestioning support, crucial vacations, careful citation-checking, and enthusiastic childcare. They never thought it was weird that I wanted to study science and history and culture and technology and everything else. What a gift. Breanne, Brendan, Brian, Deena, Laura, Matilda, and Sean don't really understand what I do because it's irrelevant to their affection and goofiness, which is also a gift. Tobias and Jonas make life joyful and deliver necessary hugs, laughter, and love. I dedicate this book to Eleanor Donahue, storyteller and grandma extraordinaire, for teaching me the power, value, and incredible fun of listening to people's stories.

INTRODUCTION

Mounted dinosaur skeletons tower over museum visitors, broadcasting a sense of solidity and grace. They gaze eyeless into the distance, bathed in the dim light that protects the photosensitive glue supporting their bones. They seem to have stomped out of the distant past and paused on the exhibit's reinforced floor. Humans stream around them, incongruously active compared to the stiff dinosaurs. Children flit from specimen to specimen, crying out their excitement and (mostly) pretend fear. Adults look upward, pointing out teeth and claws and text panels to each other.

Fossils inspire curiosity and awe in part because they are natural. Visitors flock to see these skeletons not because they are science fiction but instead because they represent real (and bizarre) animals. Museums emphasize specimens' naturalness, such as in exhibit text panels that list facts about dinosaurs as once-living animals but not as fossilized bones that people have painstakingly collected, prepared, studied, and mounted. Paleontologists too focus on the animals by publishing proposed facts without describing how the specimens that inspired those facts were processed into scientific evidence. This book asks how these bones become specimens and, crucially, who does this expert work.

If visitors think about it, they would acknowledge that these magnificent skeletons did not stroll in from the Mesozoic era and stand obligingly in place in the museum. But they might not know that these skeletons were once fragmentary, distorted chunks of rock, embedded in the geologic strata formed from their prehistoric habitats and virtually unrecognizable to the untrained eye. After all, now those fossilized bones are clean and uncrushed. They have been assembled into skeletons with no missing parts, ringed by panels spelling out confident-sounding facts about the animals' lifestyles and environments. How does this transformation happen? Naive visitors might think that scientists pick up fossils from the ground, blow the dust off them, and declare them a new species. More savvy visitors might know that vertebrate fossils are usually rare, fragile, and encased in rock, but they might assume that removing that rock and keeping the fossils from disintegrating is relatively routine, easy work that doesn't affect the fossils' appearance or value as evidence. The people who do this work have a different view: the seemingly mundane processes of preparing specimens are skillful, creative, and a fundamental part of learning about past life. This book investigates the people who prepare fossil specimens for research and display, and, accordingly, how their work defines prehistoric animals, museum displays, and science itself.

Some exhibits hint at the people and work behind the specimens. Among the extinct animals standing upright (thanks to vertebra-cradling steel) or lying half buried in slabs of rock (perhaps still curled in their death pose), there might be information about how scientists, technicians, students, volunteers, and amateurs find fossils in the field, along with a shovel or geologic map. Often this is the only public mention of the many kinds of work that make possible the intricate structures of petrified bone that we call dinosaurs, mammoths, and saber-toothed cats.

As a wonderful exception, a few exhibits house a small, brightly lit room enclosed by windows, in sharp contrast to the large twilight exhibit hall. This room looks like a display case-a giant version of the specimen-containing vitrines placed throughout the museum. But behind this glass are people. Clad in dusty T-shirts, they bend over fossils, peering closely to look for the subtle interface between fossil bone and its surrounding rock, which they call matrix. Then they scratch away matrix-and not fossil, they fervently hope-with tools that resemble a dentist's. These workers are surrounded by tubs of plaster, bottles of glue, buckets of discarded matrix, microscopes, noisy fans sucking rock dust out of the air, and tables laden with specimens as well as coffee cups,

houseplants, and toy dinosaurs. Visitors typically assume that the people on display are scientists-a misconception that some museums' text panels perpetuate. These workers, however, claim a different identity from "scientist"; they are fossil preparators. Fossil preparators describe their work of removing matrix and gluing fragmented bones as preparing fossils. Another logical though incorrect interpretation of watching them work would be, as I heard one impressed visitor exclaim to a child, "Look! People making fossils!"

Preparators do not "make" fossils from scratch; rather, they make fossils into specimens. Selecting natural objects to study and then turning them into specimens that can be studied is one of the central tasks of science. After all, specimens are the foundation of knowledge about life and environments, and how they change. Some specimens are alive, such as the creatures nurtured by workers in zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens. Others are preserved in forms such as pickled or dried animals, pressed plants, sliced rocks, polished minerals, insects pinned in boxes, and pollen grains captured on glass microscope slides. As objects carefully labeled and stored in perpetuity in museum and university collections, specimens offer trustworthy physical evidence for scientists' knowledge claims.

We might assume, as museums and scientists imply, that these objects move directly from their habitats into scientific papers and exhibits. Along the way, though, people process them physically and epistemically, so that they become researchable and displayable. For vertebrate fossils as well as other objects, this work involves separating useless background (such as matrix) from informative specimen (such as fossilized bone), often based only on subtle differences in appearance and material composition. Preparing nature for study and display requires decisions about what an object should look like, and what it should be capable of. For example, should a preparator remove all the matrix around a fossil or leave it partly embedded? Should a preparator make a fossil solid enough to be handled by applying glue that degrades over time, or omit the unstable chemical additives and allow the fossil to remain physically fragile? Should a preparator fill in the inevitable missing bones by imagining and sculpting replacement parts? Many questions like these shape how research workers, including scientists, preparators, conservators, collection managers, and volunteers, decide how to convert nature into specimens and knowledge. This book complements previous rich analyses of scientists' interpretations of specimens by investigating the people and practices involved in making these long-lasting, trusted, yet changeable objects.

How workers prepare fossils illustrates how research communities produce the evidence, experts, methods, and perceptions of science that constitute our beliefs about nature. To understand this important work, we must understand the workers. First, I discuss how fossil preparation inspires a new model for understanding science. This model highlights the crucial roles of work, objects, and craft in research. Next, I explain how I studied technicians who leave few written traces. Because scientists rarely describe fossil preparation or include preparators as authors in scientific