Volunteers needed to aid paleontologists
U. museum offering classes prior to work in lab or field
Walkington, Salt Lake City, is one of the volunteers working with the Utah Museum of Natural History to uncover the state's distant prehistory, with fossils dating back 75 million years to 150 million years. Now the museum is inviting others to join the volunteers for training, preparation work and, eventually, digging in the field under professional supervision.
A series of classes for volunteers starts Wednesday at the museum, 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., according to a press release. The museum is located on the University of Utah campus at 1390 E. Presidents Circle (200 S.).
Most of the volunteers do not have backgrounds in paleontology, according to the museum.
The training and volunteer work are "actually something relatively unique to this museum," Mike Getty, collections manager for paleontology, told the Deseret Morning News. There are some other programs like this one but not many.
Following the lessons on fossil preparation, volunteers eventually can help at digs as well, he said. "Once they do this, they can go on and actually get training in the field aspects of our program."
"They (the volunteers) will be a little bit like a fish in a bowl," he said.
Getty, who has trained "well over 200 volunteers" in the last five years or so, said 50 to 70 are active at any one time. "Once they do the training they can pretty much come in on their own time," he said.
For every hour of field work at a dinosaur site, an estimated five or 10 hours of lab work is needed. "It requires a vast amount of labor to clean and stabilize the specimens for research and display."
Besides removing rock from bone, the volunteers use adhesives and other material to hold the fossils together. And they may find themselves working on other animals that were contemporaries of the dinosaurs such as fossil turtles and crocodiles, he said.
"We completely depend on them. With the amount of labor that would be involved, we don't have enough staff."
Walkington said she volunteers three or four times a week, putting in perhaps 10 or 12 hours weekly.
"But that's unusual. Most people don't do that much," she said.
When she started with the museum 13 years ago, the classes had not yet started. "I trained on the job ... It took me a couple of years." Now training can be completed in a matter of weeks.
As a member of the club of amateur paleontologists called the Utah Friends of Paleontology, she acts as an aide to the professionals.
"We go out into the field, and survey and find bones and dig them, and then we bring them to the lab and prepare them," she said. "We're working all the time with the professionals and the graduate students, and it's a very interesting group of volunteers as well."
Presently she's finishing preparing the skull of a hadrosaur, a duckbill dinosaur. The fossil has "a lot of skin impressions," a rare discovery, and skin looks like a lizard's, with "little circles, little bumps.
"This skull is very unusual in that there was the neck attached to it," she said.
"It's kind of like treasure hunting," Walkington added, "because it's all encased in rock, and you don't know exactly what you get until you uncover it."
Those who are interested should visit the museum Wednesday.
E-mail: bau@desnews.com
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