Fossil preparators play a critical role in shaping the fossil specimens we see on display in natural history museums. I spent several years as a volunteer in the FossiLab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History surrounded by people doing this kind of work. (I don’t think I’ve ever confessed on this blog that I was a FossiLab volunteer, though it was probably quite obvious. Also, I don’t consider the microscope work I did with microfossils brought in from the field to be fossil preparation.) This post is my attempt, sitting in the cheap seats, to cheer on the preparators, and to consider some of the complicated issues that greater transparency in delineating their roles appears to raise.
The newest incarnation of the glass-walled FossiLab is located at one end of the Fossil Hall and provides visitors with a look at volunteers working with fossils. Its opening was celebrated in a piece in Smithsonian Magazine. (Bedford, 2019. Full citations to all references are at the end of this post.) Many of the volunteers around me in the previous versions of the lab in which I worked were, in my estimation, fossil preparators expertly removing matrix from bones and teeth; using air scribes to reveal fragile plant fossils or uncover teeth in a jaw bone; fashioning archival housing to store and cradle heavy or fragile fossils; making realistic, detailed molds and casting fossil bones; carefully gluing fossil fragments back into coherent wholes; and so on. At each step, they made decisions, alone or in consultation with professional preparators or scientists, which, whether big or small, influenced the content and contours of the fossils upon which they worked – adding or, on occasion, subtracting value. What these people in the lab were (and are) doing in the “fish bowl” of the FossiLab may well offer onlooking museum visitors access to the most important paleontological insight they could gain from a visit to the museum: fossils, despite their biological and paleontological origins in deep time, are also the products of human hands.
In a recent, provocative article titled Fossils Are Shaped by People. Does That Matter?, Asher Elbein describes two realities: (1) fossils on display in museums and elsewhere are human-mediated reconstructions of ancient life, and (2) the mediators are fossil preparators who largely and unfairly do not receive the credit due them. (Elbein, 2023.) The dynamic of these two realities is delineated in fine grain by Caitlin Donahue Wylie in the case studies that formed the foundation for her book analyzing fossil preparation in university and museum labs. (Wylie, 2021a.) Though the activities on display in a glass-walled lab in a museum might lead some to think fossils are being created, Wylie writes, “Preparators do not ‘make’ fossils from scratch; rather, they make fossils into specimens.” (Wylie, 2021a, p. 3) This is a crucial distinction and part of the process of “preparing knowledge.”
The label "preparator" seems inconsistently applied in the literature, leaving me confused as to when the term is used to describe only employed staff preparators, or used more broadly to encompass volunteers as well. (Of course, my lack understanding is not an uncommon state of affairs as any reader of this blog will confirm). Wylie writes,
Preparators don’t have PhDs or authorship on publications. They receive no formal training or methodological protocols. To distinguish themselves from low-skill, instruction-following technicians, preparators portray their practices as creative and artistic. Moreover, the majority of people who prepare fossils are volunteers, not staff. (Wylie, 2021a, p. 11.)
What am I to conclude from a passage like this? Does she embrace volunteers as preparators or draw some sort of distinction? Are "preparators" different (paid and on staff?) from volunteers "who prepare fossils?" In an article, she describes a person working in a fossil lab as a "volunteer fossil preparator." (Wylie, 2012b, p. 14.) But others who have read her treatise find that she makes precise and hard distinctions as to fossil lab roles. A recent reviewer of her book asserts the following (presumably reflecting their reading of what Wylie is describing):
Outnumbering both paleontologists and preparators, are the volunteers. Volunteers differ from fossil preparators sometimes via skill, but always in terms of professionalization and responsibility. Volunteers prepare fossils, but do not make decisions about how. . . .
So, the preparation of fossils relies on a network of paleontologists, who don't know how to prepare but do know how to interpret, preparators, who do not interpret, but prepare and decide how to prepare, and volunteers, who simply prepare, turning to preparators for guidance. (Currie, 2023, p. 4. "Simply prepare" is a singularly inappropriate and misleading phrase for any kind of fossil preparation work.)
Is Adrian Currie providing an accurate reading of Wylie? I think such a hard and fast separation of preparators from volunteers misses an important aspect of the dynamic at play in fossil labs. There is a sharing of skills and roles in the preparator universe. So, in this post, rightly or wrongly, I use the label expansively to describe both professionals and volunteers. In my view, preparators are often volunteers, young and old, elsewhere employed or retired. Staff preparators may oversee and train volunteer preparators, but they do not make up the lion’s share of people who do this work. And volunteer preparators have a significant influence on fossils' transition to specimens.
Unlike paleontologists who follow a path of rigorous and lengthy academic preparation to reach their professional status, preparators in general have no structured, widely accepted course of study. Wylie has observed:
There is no specific training or certification required to work as a preparator; preparators teach novices on the job through informal supervision and advice. They draw on skills from their diverse backgrounds to free fossils from rock and piece them together. (Wylie, 2021b, p. 14.)
There is a movement to professionalize the fossil preparation field, delineating what it should take to be hired as a preparator. For instance, with support from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, a group of professional preparators has identified the competencies that should underlie fossil preparation. (Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2011.) Further, there are models of programs to train volunteers in preparation skills and attitudes. The Smithsonian's FossiLab was the setting for one such program which trained and screened volunteers who then staffed the lab going forward. (Jabo, et al., 2010; Brown, et al., 2010.)
Context setting is important here. Much of the concern about transparency in the realm of fossil preparation focuses on vertebrate paleontology, the field that produces the fossil skeletons that are the megastars of natural history museums and the objects of out-of-control bidding in fossil auctions worldwide. Wylie posits that there is a strict division of labor in vertebrate paleontology when it comes to fossil preparation. She states that vertebrate paleontologists for the most part don't know how to do the preparation work that enables them to study their specimens. In contrast, invertebrate paleontologists do. (Wylie, 2021a, p. 12.) Nevertheless, it seems to me that, though the concerns and stakes may be less for invertebrate fossils, many of the same issues surrounding fossil preparation remain. (It's not always clear in the literature on fossil preparation whether or when this vertebrate/invertebrate distinction is being applied.)
Preparators as described by Elbein and Wylie are, to the outside world, largely invisible participants in the process of translating fossils into specimens. Wylie argues that the absence of due credit (e.g., in publications) to preparators, and their relatively low status in institutional hierarchies mean that “scientists effectively reify the more visible products and people of science: facts and scientists.” (Wylie, 2021a, p. 9) This ends up obscuring the actual process through which fossils are recovered from deep time, a process that introduces a subjectivity to the “facts,” and that is a blend of artistry and science. In essence, a call for crediting the work of fossil preparators is a call to make that blend known, highlighting who did the preparation and what they did.
Though from what I observed in my years of volunteering in the lab, all of this rings true, but I am having a hard time seeing the form that the desired and deserved credit for fossil preparators should take. Let me start by highlighting two fossils from my collection representing extremes of the credit issue.
The fish fossils are from the genus Knightia. These are fresh water herrings from the Green River Formation in Wyoming and date back to the Eocene (roughly 50 million years ago). That is all the background I have on these fish. I don’t know precisely where they were found. More to the point, I don’t know if what I have at hand is the slab of limestone matrix exactly as it was exposed in the field or whether some preparator worked on the slab to expose more of the fish before sending it into the commercial market where I bought it. No record of what happened to the fossils on this slab means no way to give any credit.
This fossil is a trilobite, Kainops raymondi, found in the Haragan Formation in Oklahoma and dating back to the Lower Devonian (400 or more million years ago). This specimen was prepared by Marc Behrendt, a preparator who serves the commercial market. I purchased this fossil from him and received detailed photographs delineating many of the steps in the process of removing matrix from the trilobite. Giving credit for this one is a slam dunk.
There is a broad middle ground between these two extremes, but complications seem to arise at every turn. For instance, as I witnessed it, the fossil preparation process can be a communal project in which multiple people have a hand. How is credit granted in that case? Those who did the most work? The most important? Only the professional staff preparators? How should any of this be measured? At a minimum, some sort of paper trail of the preparation process seems in order.
On the other hand, if a single preparator works largely alone to turn a fossil into a specimen, there’s not much challenge in identifying to whom the credit should be given. Even in that case, the process of rendering credit should depend upon record keeping delineating not only who worked on the fossil but what they did.
The issue of documenting the preparation process poses a challenge. As Wylie has written, “crucially, preparators leave few written records.” (Wylie, 2021a, p. 59.) This has some disquieting consequences. Researchers may be at some removed from the preparation process, remaining largely ignorant of what was done to the fossil. Wylie observes, “This lack of record keeping and supervision grants preparators de facto power over their techniques.” (Wylie, 2021a, p. 59.) Perhaps it's not surprising, as Elbein writes, “Many experts argue that preparators deserve both recognition and scrutiny.” (Elbein, 2022.) Transparency is a two-edged sword that may reshape the contours of the role of the fossil preparator.
A different set of issues arises when one considers how to give credit to preparators. I wrote a post nearly a decade ago about a small mammal skeleton from the Late Cretaceous that was then on display at the National Museum of Natural History.
It’s a lovely skeleton, but what was on display was not an actual set of bones, but a cast of a specimen for which only some 30 percent of the actual bones were recovered (that’s still a very high percentage). Here’s a picture of the label attached to the skeleton.
The collector is listed as Mike Triebold. With minimal effort, the curious could follow that clue to the preparation of the skeleton by Triebold Paleontology, Inc. which Triebold headed and to the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center which he founded. This label doesn’t go as far as it could to make the preparation transparent to a museum researcher or visitor. That said, how much detailed information should be given? Just who had a hand in the preparation? Some gauge of how much and what kind of preparation was involved?
Attribution of some aspects of the role that fossil preparators have played with individual specimens should made explicit. Research papers might more consistently acknowledge and, within reason, describe the work done to prepare specimens. Laboratory records could record who did what (though preparators would still remain largely invisible to the public). This attribution need not be as significant as was the case with Opisthiamimus gregori, a newly identified Jurassic reptile. The authors of the research article in which the new species was named wrote:
The species epithet ‘gregori’ recognizes Joseph Gregor, a dedicated Smithsonian volunteer who skillfully prepared the holotype and referred specimens. (DeMar, 2022, p. 6.)
These are challenging issues with no simple answers given the myriad variables at play in the process of preparing fossils. I think it can only be helpful to make more explicit the role that preparators, whether professional or volunteer, play and, in doing so, give the general public a nuanced and more accurate understanding of what is on display. Fossil preparation is important work that, whether we recognize it or not, directly influences how we view and understand fossils.
Sources
Bailey Bedford, Smithsonian Puts Backstage Fossil Preparation Center Stage in its New Fossil Hall, Smithsonian Magazine, October 16, 2019.
Matthew Brown, et al., The Smithsonian Institution’s Exhibit Fossil Preparation Lab Volunteer Training Programme, Part II: Training and Evaluating Student Preparators, Geological Curator, Volume 9, Number 3, September, 2010.
Adrian Currie, Cleaning, sculpting or preparing? Scientific knowledge in Caitlin Wylie’s Preparing Dinosaurs, Biology & Philosophy, Volume 38, Number 10, 2023.
David G. DeMar, Jr., et al., A nearly complete skeleton of a new eusphenodontian from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation, Wyoming, USA, provides insight into the evolution and diversity of Rhynchocephalia (Reptilia: Lepidosauria), Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, Volume 22, Issue 1, 2022.
Asher Elbein, Fossils Are Shaped by People. Does That Matter?, Undark Magazine, November 11, 2023.
Steven J. Jabo, The Smithsonian Institution’s Exhibit Fossil Preparation Lab Volunteer Training Programme, Part I: Design and Recruitment, Geological Curator, Volume 9, Number 3, 2010.
Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Defining the Professional Vertebrate Fossil Preparator: Essential Competencies, 2011.
Caitlin Donahue Wylie, Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work Behind the Scenes, 2021a.
Caitlin Donahue Wylie, What Fossils Preparators Can Teach Us About More Inclusive Science, Issues in Science and Technology, Fall, 2021b.
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