Scientist That Studies Fossils

Field Prep and Lab Work for Anyone Calling Themselves a Paleontologist

You show up at a site, you dig, you package bones, and you send them somewhere they can be properly studied. The title "Scientist That Studies Fossils" is what people use when they don't know the word paleontologist. The job itself is less romantic than most people think. It involves a lot of waiting, a lot of paperwork, and occasionally a lot of arguing with museum curators about who owns a specimen that walked out of the ground on state land. Most of the time, you are not discovering new species. You are processing material someone else collected, writing descriptions, running comparative analyses, and dealing with institutional bureaucracy. A typical week might involve three days of laboratory prep work using air scribes and micro-drills, one day of data entry into collections management software, and one day spent on a field trip or doing outreach. The balance shifts depending on whether you work for a university, a museum, or a government agency. Stratigraphic context is everything. A fossil without precise stratigraphic and geographic data is basically just a rock with something interesting in it. It has limited scientific value. I once spent six weeks preparing a perfectly preserved ammonite block only to realize the field notebook from the excavation had recorded the wrong formation. The specimen was geologically useless for whatever study I was planning. We eventually cross-referenced the matrix composition with published stratigraphic columns and managed to narrow it down to within two meters of the correct horizon, but that was lucky. It is not always this easy.

How to Actually Enter This Field

A PhD is effectively required if you want a tenure-track position or a permanent role at a research museum. That is the structural reality, not a complaint. You do not need one to work in fossil preparation or at a natural history museum as a technician. Those positions exist and they pay adequately. What you do need is hands-on experience, and you get that by volunteering at museums, assisting on excavations, or applying for summer field schools. I recommended the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's field school program to someone asking about this recently. It is competitive but far more useful than random applications to professors. They place people with actual field experience rather than just transcripts.

Tools and Techniques That Matter

Most fossil preparation happens with pneumatic air scribes, dental drills, and hand tools under magnification. Consolidants like Paraloid B-72 in acetone are standard for stabilizing fragile specimens. For sediment removal, artists' air brushes and fine-tipped picks do most of the work. I switched to using a W&H micromotor with custom-ground tungsten carbide burs instead of the standard catalog bits, and it cut my prep time on delicate ornithischian fragments by roughly forty percent because the burr geometry matched the break patterns in the bone matrix much better. CT scanning has become routine for many labs now. It is not a replacement for physical preparation, but it tells you immediately whether a concretion contains anything worth the hours of labor it would take to extract. Running a specimen through a micro-CT before committing to mechanical prep can save an entire week of work on an empty nodule.

Common Mistakes Beginners Make

The biggest one is treating the specimen as more important than the surrounding matrix. Matrix contains dating evidence, paleoenvironmental data, and associated fossils. Strip it all away and you lose context. Another mistake is using superglue (cyanoacrylate) as a consolidant on porous bone. It darkens the specimen permanently and creates a hard crust that prevents proper adhesive penetration later. Paraloid B-72 at five to ten percent in acetone is the safer default for most applications. Documentation is where most early-career people fail. Photograph everything before you touch it. Record coordinates, formation, and associated fauna in the field. Digital photos with scale bars and north arrows should be standard practice, not an afterthought. I have seen valuable material lose most of its research potential because the original collector did not photograph the in-situ position.

Software and Data Management

Biodiversity Heritage Library for literature searches. MorphoManager or past for basic morphometric work. Avizo or Dragonfly for CT image segmentation if you have access to the hardware. Collections management typically runs on Specify 7 for institutions that use open-source solutions, though many larger museums have migrated to custom databases. Learning basic SQL will serve you better than any specialized paleontology software because every institution manages its collection data differently. Funding is uneven and project-based. A lot of paleontology research depends on grant cycles, which means job security is thin outside of museum staff or university positions. Field work is physically demanding and often happens in remote locations with minimal infrastructure. Specimen collection is increasingly restricted. Many countries have banned the export of fossils entirely, and in the United States, fossil collection on federal land requires permits that are not guaranteed. Some institutions are also rethinking how they handle specimens collected under questionable ethical circumstances, which affects both research access and provenance tracking. If your goal is purely academic research, a PhD from a program with active field funding is important. If your goal is preparation and curation, technician positions at museums are the more direct route. Both paths require patience more than brilliance.