Conservation
Fabienne Grellet-Tinner, when an undergraduate, cleaning and repairing damaged specimens.
Type, Figured, and Historic Collections
All museum collections require periodic maintenance. The diverse origins of our collections create challenging problems with respect to their curation.
Current efforts include major conservation within the type collection as part of one NSF project and within the historic collection as part of another NSF project.
Many fossils collected about 100 years ago were coated in shellac, or equivalent. The technique was common at the time and produced an impressive glossy surface and in some instances even prevented the specimens from falling apart. The practice, however, has left us with a conservation issue. What should we do with aging, discolored, often cracking fossils that were chemically treated in this way? Follow our progress as we try to tackle this challenge with this first experiment!
Other problems and how we have solved them are outlined below.