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Whale vertebrae prep help


JorisVV

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I'm looking to clean 2 whale verts i found long ago. I am experienced with prepping mammoth and rhino teeth but not whale.

Can anybody help me?

 

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I've only cleaned encrusted fossils from a marine source like this a couple times so hopefully more experienced people weigh in, but...

I had the best results removing encrusted material with air abrasion. Some of the stuff clings super tight and it wasn't very practical in my case to scribe it off. The shells and encrustations of many species are calcium carbonate based so perhaps a treatment with vinegar would work for fossils that don't have calcium carbonate replacement, presumably like this bone.

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  • Fossildude19 changed the title to Whale vertebrae prep help
29 minutes ago, Ptychodus04 said:

What tools do you have at your disposal? This makes a big difference in how you attack this.

Right now I used a broombrush sort and a knife to clean some harder parts. It is going really wel and got 90% from the first one

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  • 3 weeks later...

ok so I have cleaned verts and teeth with a 50/50 mix of white vinegar and distilled water. I let the vert/tooth soak for 4 hrs and then use plastic scrapers. I then let it soak and scrap...soak and scrap until clean.

Here is a mastodon tooth for an example I cleaned. this took several cycles of soaking and scraping. 

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" This comment brought to you by the semi-famous AeroMike"

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11 hours ago, AeroMike said:

ok so I have cleaned verts and teeth with a 50/50 mix of white vinegar and distilled water. I let the vert/tooth soak for 4 hrs and then use plastic scrapers. I then let it soak and scrap...soak and scrap until clean.

Here is a mastodon tooth for an example I cleaned. this took several cycles of soaking and scraping. 

 

 

Wow, those are fabulous results.

"There is no shortage of fossils. There is only a shortage of paleontologists to study them." - Larry Martin

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