Freeing the dinos within
Paleontologists have long faced a daunting obstacle
to their research: Fossils are usually embedded
in rock. To manually wrench the fossils
out, scientists use an array of tools, from needles
to dentist’s drills to dissolving acids, often
with destructive results. Swedish paleozoologist
Erik Jarvik, for example, famously took 25
years to create a precise, anatomically correct
3D wax model of the Eusthenopteron fish, but
by the end the fossil itself had been destroyed.
Read more in the short article published in December 2014 in PNAS.
Image credit: Cunningham et al