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    All Featured Books
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  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
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    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
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Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Michelle Pinsdorf

Blog Reel, Featured Books, User Stories

Building the Smithsonian’s Dinosaurs with Materials from the Smithsonian Libraries and BHL

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My name is Michelle Pinsdorf, and I am a paleontologist and preparator of fossil vertebrates in the Smithsonian National Natural History Museum’s Department of Paleobiology. Preparators’ work can cover a wide variety of duties, from fieldwork to discovering new fossil specimens, to freeing those specimens from their surrounding host rock in our laboratories, to safely housing specimens for research collections, and helping to build exhibits for specimens going out on display. We call it “grave to cradle” work.

Most of the time you’ll find a fossil preparator leaning over a lab bench with a fine tool in hand, peering through a microscope and exposing the details of a fossil that helps researchers identify and publish about it. But for the past five years, my lab colleagues and I have been working on the renovation of the Natural History Museum’s fossil exhibits. This has involved the dismantling of many previously exhibited fossil mounts to allow for the conservation of the fossils and remounting them in new poses and settings. With the significant scientific value of these fossils, a lot of research and planning happens before each individual specimen is worked on.

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November 14, 2019byMichelle Pinsdorf

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. BHL’s global consortium of natural history, botanical, and research libraries cooperate to digitize and make their collections accessible as a part of a global “biodiversity commons.”

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