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Preserving Fossils


Ronbo

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I was wondering what do you put on different fossils to preserve them, would you use the same stuff on sharks teeth as you would vretabrae or bone?

Thanks

Ron

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all i've done with shark teeth found in salt water is put them in fresh water a while to get the salt out.

shark teeth found on older sites on land or in rivers, i haven't done anything to them.

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oops, only answered half the question. with bone, many would use a thin solution of vinac, butvar, or duco cement in acetone.

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I agree with tracer, if it is stable I don't use anything on them. I know there are some that likes to treat everything but to me it takes away from the beauty of the fossil, I like them natural. If they are unstable then I would do as Tracer suggest to stablize them.

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Guest Nicholas

I don't touch stable fossils at all, those which need a little TLC I usually use watered down Elmers. Although there are those who would say that is a bad move. Oh and if possible always wash in fresh water.

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I like using butvar but I would not use it on the enamel of teeth just the roots.

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The best days are spent collecting fossils

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I like using butvar but I would not use it on the enamel of teeth just the roots.

(Ahem!) I understand the reluctance to mess with the consolidant, but it is mis-guided.

If you value a vertebrate fossil (I exclude shark teeth here) -- and you want it to last -- consolidate it with a plastic.

You cannot reliably judge by eye what will happen to the bone after 2 years, or 5 years, or 15 years in your drawer. Bones with which you could drive nails when first collected may split after years in your drawer. Teeth, when thoroughly dry, may split. These splits cannot be repaired to the original condition because of distortion to the bone or dentin or cementum.

This may happen to any bone, so, if you're going to keep the bone, play the probabilities. Consolidate! Impregnation with plastic will prevent many later headaches (I'm not telling you to soak your head in consolidant). I am saying that there is nothing more disheartening to open a drawer and to find a prize specimen tooth split in two.

Trust the decades of museum experience.

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What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

---Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

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(Ahem!) I understand the reluctance to mess with the consolidant, but it is mis-guided.

If you value a vertebrate fossil (I exclude shark teeth here) -- and you want it to last -- consolidate it with a plastic.

You cannot reliably judge by eye what will happen to the bone after 2 years, or 5 years, or 15 years in your drawer. Bones with which you could drive nails when first collected may split after years in your drawer. Teeth, when thoroughly dry, may split. These splits cannot be repaired to the original condition because of distortion to the bone or dentin or cementum.

This may happen to any bone, so, if you're going to keep the bone, play the probabilities. Consolidate! Impregnation with plastic will prevent many later headaches (I'm not telling you to soak your head in consolidant). I am saying that there is nothing more disheartening to open a drawer and to find a prize specimen tooth split in two.

Trust the decades of museum experience.

That what I was thinkig I hate to watch them start splitting or breaking,

WTH is butvar? where ya get it?

How ya impregnate with plastic?

Could someone kinda point me in the direction where I can see the process in the making?

Thanks for yalls replies,I get busy and forget where I am some times,LOL

Kids have a tendency to kinda derail your train of thought..LOL

Ron

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your neighborhood store isn't going to have butvar or vinac, so you'll have to order it. use the search function here to find how others recommend diluting duco cement. at any rate, butvar and vinac are just trade names for two polymers. i hate to use the generic term "plastics", but that's kinda the idea. these things come to you as dry little beads. basically, you then buy some acetone, (although some use other solvents), and you put some of the beads in acetone, and the beads dissolve. the acetone is a "carrier" for the dissolved polymer. then when you dip your fossil in the stuff, or brush the stuff on your fossil, the acetone (hopefully) carries the dissolved polymer deep into the fossil. then the acetone, which is volatile as heck and which will likely go off in a huge fireball should you give it the slightest opportunity, evaporates/dissipates/vamoositates, and what you're left with is a bone from the toy section of the store, impregnated (no, it isn't going to have baby bones) with chummy plastic to keep it safe and semi-sound.

Now, people mix this stuff up thick and thin. What some do is mix it thick, to use it as a glue to stick broken parts together. then they add more acetone to thin the solution out for dipping or brushing. if you really wanted to get gee whiz, you'd figure out how to put a vacuum on the bone so the solution would be sucked into ever crook and nanny, but that's not what most of us will be doing.

ok, one major issue is that stuff needs to be DRY before you put this junk on, otherwise you may get milkiness develop and you don't want milk bones unless you're trying to make dog treats, but i don't think you should be feeding acetone and plastic to your dog.

the only way i've tried to preserve wet bone is with water-based PVA glue diluted in more water. this does put the polymer into the surface somewhat, and does seem to help, but the surface of the bone will feel "tacky" later if you hold it with your humid little paws for very long.

there. i've typed my little heart out for you. please bear in mind, though, that a hundred years from now, none of this is going to matter, so perspective is important. <doing my snoopy dance>

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I had gone on line and found a supplier at a good price. I have some things I have to do but will get back on it. A friend of George Phillips is the head of the Paleontology dept of the Mississippi Natural Science Museum and recommended butvar. George has been a great help to us with all fossil care info.

Edited by lawooten
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The best days are spent collecting fossils

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Here is a workable technique for consolidating fossils.

Polyurethane will not give the desired penetration of the fossil. Putting polyurethane on a fossil is usually a bad idea.

I recommend against white glue (polyvinyl acetate) as a consolidant because there are better materials available. (Normal prep lab dilution of white glue is one part water to two parts glue.) Rarely, a specimen cannot be dried without it crumbling, and white glue is the only reasonable answer. In my experience, white glue is messy and never looks good when the specimen is fully-prepared.

A much better material for bone is a polyvinyl butyral plastic such as Butvar-76, but that material is hard to find in small quantities. I have used this plastic, dissolved in acetone, for many types of fossils. (I have used it successfully on Silurian-age shales with brachiopods, for example.) It penetrates well, and in the proper dilution it produces a "damp-looking" finish with no gloss.

Butvar-76 (but not other Butvar varieties) is also soluble in alcohol. (I assume that is denatured alcohol that you can buy in gallon cans.) I have never tried this solution for consolidation. The alcohol takes considerably longer to boil off the treated specimen. [Ed. Other plastic consolidants are available in 2023.]

So, what works? If nothing else is available, a solution of Duco Cement (clear, like model airplane glue) in acetone. Dilution? Start with a tube of glue dissolved in about eight ounces of acetone in a glass jar. With any consolidant, shake well to dissolve the plastic.

Adjust the dilution with more acetone until, after shaking, the tiniest air bubbles are just slightly retarded in their rise to the surface.

I usually heat specimens with an infra-red lamp to drive off moisture just before dipping the fossil. I do this with all sorts of fossils, and have never had one damaged by the heating. The untreated specimen is always at least as wet at the relative humidity of the air around it, I suppose. (A microwave oven may be as effective, but I've only dried glass beads for my air-abrasive unit.)

Do NOT heat the acetone solution directly. The acetone solution will get warm after dipping a number of heated fossils. You must have good ventilation to deal with the fumes!

I use a long-jawed forceps -- ten-inch tweezers, really -- to dip and/or retreive the fossils from the jar.

Ideally, you would submerge the dry specimen in this consolidant for a brief time (say 15-30 seconds, or until the specimen stops fizzing). Set each wet specimen aside to dry on cardboard (I use beer-flats).

For a specimen too thick to be submerged, you can use a turkey-baster to flood the difficult areas. I treated an adult mammoth tibia that, because of its size, I dried in the Florida sun, then used the baster to pump consolidant into every opening of the bone.

I use a RubberMaid-type cake-pan to hold the consolidant for this soaking step - that plastic seems to be impervious to the acetone. Get 'em at your local dollar-store.

Acetone evaporates very quickly. Replenish the consolidant mixture with a bit of acetone if you are using it on many specimens. Store it in a tightly sealed glass jar. Even if some acetone evaporates away between uses (it always does, it seems), you can reconstitute the solution by replacing the acetone.

Acetone is a nasty solvent. The fumes are explosive. The fumes are toxic. The liquid penetrates the skin-blood barrier. It's best to use gloves. Use in a well-ventilated area.

--------------Harry Pristis

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What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

---Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

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Guest solius symbiosus
Putting polyurethane on a fossil is usually a bad idea.

I'll second that. I have never used it, but was told many years ago that since it is an organic alkane, microbes will eventually infiltrate the piece searching for a meal, and eventually, deteriorate the bond.

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Cool info I may have to look into this stuff a little more, I know artifacts some folks soaks them in mineral oil and get the colors to show and make the piece look new, I have done a couple but dont much care for it,in fact most of the things I have still the dirt on them..

I may try a fossil or two when La finds out what shes gonna find out,

Again thanks much and thanks for all the typing it takes to answer,

Thanks again ya`ll

Ron

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I personally use Vinac, which is apparently fairly similar to butvar. You can buy solid vinac (in bead form) from paleobond - 20 bucks for a quart or so of beads; just a spoonful of vinac beads will work well for a cup of acetone.

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Harry,

What would you use to protect the enamel of teeth? <_<

I don't distinguish between bone and teeth -- everything gets heated by infra-red lamp and then plopped into the Butvar-76/acetone solution. I don't worry about thermal shock any more -- it just never happened, even when the tooth was too hot to hold in my hand for very long.

Dentin, the softer core of mammal teeth, will behave like other bone. It may dry and contort, splitting perfectly-good enamel. Cementum, the exterior covering or gap-filler of many mammal teeth is notorious for crumbling when dried-out. Cementum is what holds the enamel plates together in a mammoth tooth. Mammoth teeth usually need a big drink of consolidant to make them more durable.

If you have the solution at the proper dilution, you will get a "damp-looking" finish on the teeth with no gloss.

post-42-1226549845_thumb.jpgpost-42-1226549898_thumb.jpg

If you miscalculate the dilution, the gloss can be reduced by flushing the teeth with acetone and an old tooth brush. I paid attention because I was consolidating scores of fossils at a time, dipping one batch while the next was heating. A miscalculation of dilution which produced a gloss on my fossils would be a royal pain. You can always test one fossil first, which is what I did many times.

Even though I knew how to do this, and I had all the materials and the facilities, I sometimes put an unconsolidated fossil into my drawer. Over the years, I have lost some fossils or have had them damaged because I neglected this preparation for some reason or other. Don't make the same mistake if you want to insure that your fossils will be intact for posterity.

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http://pristis.wix.com/the-demijohn-page

 

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

---Shakespeare, The Tempest

 

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wow i hadnt thought about this until now... Harry should i be preserving the micro bones? i definantly dont want them splitting or being damaged.... is it nessasary with these specimins? if so what would you suggest be the best method?

"Turn the fear of the unknown into the excitment of possibility!"


We dont stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.

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Wow a world of information here that I really appreciate very much. Thanks to all! We uncovered a bone bed and now I need to get down to doing the treatments need to preserve them before storing them. We are converting our two car garage to a work area and storage area just for fossils. LOL it is almost one third full with the larger specimens. When we sort through all of them we have picked some museums and colleges we would like to donate to in the future but for now collecting and treating them is high priority. At least till it gets too cold to go out which seems to be in the far future since the weather has been so great to us. You know I am still growing peppers in my garden not to mention a full winter crop of greens and salads. Again thanks to each and everyone of you for your help.

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The best days are spent collecting fossils

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one consideration that remains for scientifically valuable specimens is the reversibility of consolidation, which rules out unknown/proprietary formulations of chemicals or those which crosslink into irreversibility over time. although a semi-standard polymer may be present in a favored commercial product referenced here, the additional presence of nitrocellulose and possibly other additives gives me pause to ponder. thoughts?

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wow i hadnt thought about this until now... Harry should i be preserving the micro bones? i definantly dont want them splitting or being damaged.... is it nessasary with these specimins? if so what would you suggest be the best method?

I think you should, and Harry's diluted Duco soak sounds appropriate and fairly simple for micro bones.

"There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant

“Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley

>Paleontology is an evolving science.

>May your wonders never cease!

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