> Those hands belonged to technician Mark Mitchell, who compares the process of separating dinosaur from rock to chipping concrete chunks from a surface as soft as compressed talcum powder. It took him 7,000 hours over 5.5 years, during which he did little else. For that reason, the dinosaur carries his name—Borealopelta markmitchelli. (The first half comes from the Latin for “northern shield.”)<p>So basically, preparing a fossil is rather like sculpting a statue. The outline is there, but following it isn't so trivial.
Actually kudos to the mine workers and mine management for halting operations and letting archaeologists access the site.<p>The cost involved here is enormous with this, so such an operations often decide to ignore the bones instead.
Cool blog post about how NatGeo's 3D tour of the fossil was created using Three.js in the browser.<p><a href="https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon/" rel="nofollow">https://source.opennews.org/articles/resurrecting-dragon/</a>
Original post from 3 months ago:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14326913</a>
I wish in the headlining photo a person was standing next to the fossil to give a sense of scale. That thing is probably > 10 feet long! No wonder it took 7000 hours to separate from the rock.
Had it before but a different article and photo. Showed this to my daughter who is dino-crazy a few months ago - she went '>gasp< WOW!' genuine agape awe. Amazing. Isn't it fantastic that the operator was trained and cared enough to stop working? It would have been really cool though if prior to expetrification that the block was MRI'ed and a 3D model created from the MRI which could then be 3D printed in schools all over the world.