Cincinnati Museum Center (CMC) added even more fossils to its extensive collection after digs in rural Montana this summer.
For this summer’s dig, the museum again partnered with Elevation Science Institute, spending seven weeks in the field collecting hundreds of dinosaur fossils. The team consisted of more than 150 amateur paleontologists, some as young as 12, working alongside trained professionals from Elevation Science Institute on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.
The dig site was in a remote area where the spaces were exposed to the elements and far from any paved roads. The teams of paleontologists, fossil hunters and volunteers continued work that began two summers ago, removing tarps and dirt before using shovels, pickaxes, tile saws and jackhammers to carefully uncover bones of prehistoric creatures.
Once the fossils were found, crews would expose the fossils, still surrounded by rock, and then layer the fossils with toilet paper and tin foil before covering them in a protective field jacket made of burlap and plaster. The museum said the crews would dig underneath the fossil, lop off the rock like the top of a mushroom and carefully flip it over to cover and plaster the bottom, encasing the fossil and its surrounding rock. In its field jacket, the fossil, sometimes weighing hundreds of pounds, would be taken down the hill by hand and loaded onto a trailer to be transported across the country to CMC.
Fossils found included multiple large sauropod femora from long-necked herbivorous dinosaurs, as well as several Allosaurus toes and claws and tiny microfossils and teeth. Most of the fossils were delivered to CMC, but some were sent to the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula, where they will be prepared and later transported to Cincinnati to be processed into CMC’s collection.
Visitors to CMC’s public-facing Paleo Lab in the Museum of Natural History & Science will be able to admire some of these finds as staff and volunteers work to remove the fossils from their rock matrix.
Learn more about the museum’s fossil collection here.
Cincinnati Museum Center, 1301 Western Ave., West End. More info: cincymuseum.org.
