Restoring Edestus Teeth

[ILPaleo07]

Monty84, sorry to jump on this so late. I agree, you should probably have somebody with some experience restoring fossils take a look at these. Truth in advertising--I'm a paleontologist at the IL State Museum. We have a few Coal Mine Edestus in the collection. All were collected before ~1910. Some survived the last century in fine shape, some did not. The ones that did survive were probably coated with a thick coat of shellac. Although it seems to have worked, this isn't ideal, and today there would be other materials that we would use to consolidate a specimen (e.g., Butvar B-72). And we would likely do it under vacuum to make sure it got into all of the tiny pores. I would love to take a closer look at this material to see if we could help!

Chris