In the D.C. region, conversations often start with, “What do you do?” WTOP’s new series “Working Capital” profiles the people doing the work that makes the D.C. region unique.
As Diana Boudreau shaves bits of rock off a large, prehistoric skull, exposing rows of sharp, fossilized teeth, a giant blue dust collector tube dispatched from the ceiling sucks up bits of debris flying about the fluorescent-lit room.
“You can actually see along the edges here, there’s a bunch of teeth,” she told WTOP’s Matt Kaufax.
The fossil she’s working on is that of a massive ancient amphibian that looks like a dinosaur called Eryops. Though its appearance would suggest it’s related to Spinosaurus or a Komodo Dragon, its closest living relatives today are frogs and salamanders.
“We’re basically looking at the roof of the mouth of the animal,” Diana said, as she used a fine-tipped, whirring, chisel-like tool to chip away at bits of rock encasing the bone.
Diana is what’s known as a “fossil preparator,” working in full view of the public inside the oblong, glass-enclosed FossiLab at D.C.’s Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — located along Constitution Avenue downtown.
If you’ve ever been to the dinosaur wing of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, then you may know about the world-famous FossiLab.
Here, you can almost reach out and touch the scientists working behind the glass to uncover prehistoric pieces of the past.
In a crossover episode of WTOP’s feature segment “Matt About Town” and the ongoing “Working Capital” series (which spotlights people doing work that makes our region unique), WTOP’s Matt Kaufax got a rare opportunity to go behind the glass and see the fascinating operation up close.
During his visit, Matt also ran into Diana’s fellow fossil preparator, Myria Perez, who told him that the process by which a fossil, hundreds of millions of years old, ends up at the museum’s FossiLab is a one-of-a-kind journey that makes this job unlike any other on planet Earth.
“A lot of our curators, they’ll go out in the field and collect fossil specimens, and they’ll bring them here in the lab, where fossil preparators like myself and Diana prepare and take those bones out of the rock,” Myria said.
The Smithsonian has an army of paleontologists, archaeologists and other scientists all over the world who make these discoveries. Myria said once a fossil is found in the field, it’s wrapped in plaster bandages and sent to the museum.
Each fossil is sorted by preparators based on the need for either research or “collections.” Fossils are also meticulously cataloged in the Smithsonian’s massive database.
Wherever a fossil ends up, Myria and Diana say the first step is always the same. The rock removal process can take hundreds of hours, or even longer. Everything is done manually, requiring incredible levels of skill and concentration.
“Only a very small percentage of fossils that we have are on display,” Myria said. “A lot of them are actually behind the scenes.”
Myria said those fossils that aren’t displayed are put into the seemingly endless vault, the museum’s storage archives.
“For larger things and really fragile things, they’ll get what’s called an archival jacket,” she said.
The “jackets” are custom protective cases, made from plaster and fiberglass, which preserve the fossils for all time.
“The past is the key to the present,” Myria told WTOP.
That pervasive sentiment is what she and Diana say keeps them coming back every day.
“We have to preserve the past and conserve it and keep these specimens for as many generations as we can, so we can learn from them,” Myria said.
Diana also added that the connection to the public, who get to observe the entire process, pressed up against a few transparent inches, adds a whole other dimension to the work:
“For that, like, little moment, when they’re viewing through the glass, and they can see what I’m working on, and I flake away a little piece of rock and you can see the bone underneath — we’re the only people to have seen that surface of bone in like, hundreds of millions of years.”
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