Week Five: A Week in Pictures

The Perissodactyl project involves a lot of repetition - making labels, transcribing catalog cards, cutting mounds of ethafoam, and of course, lining hundreds of drawers. Although it may not always be the most glamourous work, it is absolutely necessary to ensure that the fossils in our care can remain useful for research for years to come.

That being said, there's only so much we can describe through writing in this blog. I thought this week it would be best to show instead of tell...



This is a box full of Dinohippus fossil foot/ankle bones. The Perissodactyl project is working to upgrade storage conditions (the box above is a collection manager's worst nightmare), and part of that is lining drawers, but another important part is keeping track of how many specimens in the horse cabinets are uncatalogued (have not been assigned an AMNH number and therefore have not been officially added to the paleontology catalog).

Here are some interns, hard at work flagging uncataloged specimens and re-lining the drawers.

For comparison's sake, here is a picture of what a more ideal storage situation would look like:

So you can see, in many cases we've got our work cut out for us. We're not worried, though - we are confident that in the next three weeks we will be able to line and inventory the majority (if not all) of the third floor storage area.

An ethafoam horse made out of scraps. Sometimes you just need a break from mounds of horse teeth.