Techniques for collecting large vertebrate fossils

Abstract

When visiting the dinosaur displays in museums such as the American Museum of Natural History, the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, or the United States National Museum of Natural History, one is overwhelmed by the abundance, diversity, and completeness of dinosaur skeletons. What is not obvious to the average visitor is that the majority of those skeletons are not from an individual animal. They are almost invariably composite skeletons containing bones from at least two individials, and many missing bones have been filled in with sculptured models constructed of plaster or fiberglass. How is it possible for paleontologists to reconstruct and mount these titanic skeletons? Perhaps even more fundamentally, how do such enormous fossil bones find their way to museums to begin with?