Unwrapping a part of Earth's history

We do this community event every year because this is a chance for people that don't get to go into the field and look for fossils. We bring it back to them so they can experience what we do as paleobiologist, and have that magical moment when you're one of the first people to unwrap a fossil. All of the fossils that we've collected are late Triassic in age. So these are things that are approximately 230 to 200 million-years-old. So we're looking at all of these reptile fossils that tell us about the early days of dinosaurs. The first thing that somebody's going to do is have a bag in front of them. And they're working with either a faculty member or a student who knows what the specimen was that was collected there. So there are bits and pieces of a skeleton of these animals. So you might have parts of ribs, parts of limb bones, parts of the backbone or parts of skulls, in some cases. Once all of the pieces are out, they all go into one box, and they get a label. And then the information that was on either that package or on the overall bag, saying when and where it was collected gets written on that tag so that later when the fossils are cleaned by undergraduates in the lab or by students that are studying the material, they have all of that information from the field. My biggest hope from these kind of events is to really see people interact with scientists directly and the materials that we study. People coming through could have aha moments in an instant just by unwrapping a specimen. And again, this process is completely accessible and we'll continue to do it for a long time. Museum collections are extremely important. So we're helping every summer here by collecting more material to build those museum collections, because every fossil has a special story that it can tell and adds to our information about life on Earth. And so we need to have all of those pieces of data to better understand the history of life.