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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

"For more than 7,000 hours over the past five years, Mitchell has slowly exposed the fossil’s skin and bone. The painstaking process is like freeing compressed talcum powder from concrete. “You almost have to fight for every millimeter,” he says."

Wow! I had no idea this took so long.

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Archaeologists are heroes. They spend years painstakingly restoring things. Many of the digs also take many years of tedious work.

I just wish they got more recognition for their work. They do hard things over long periods of time and barely get a headline... which is good that their finds aren't oversensationalized, but, I think they themselves need more direct acknowledgement.

That's a big problem in society these days. People who do solid work in the background get no recognition. Science can't work if nobody is willing to produce the data other people can work with.

Alternatively, we could figure out how to automate his job away.

That's exactly the point. If you can figure out how to automate the job come back with a solution. But until then give them respect. They do difficult that can't be automated so far.

Depends. We already automated big parts of the job that we could.

To give a stupid example I came up with in five seconds: nobody needs to draw pictures of finds anymore, we can just use cameras.

Yes, the parts that can be automated now are already automated. But the parts that are left are hard to automate and not glamorous.

I met a guy who used to work for the forest service around where I live. His job was to head to surveyed forestry sites (i.e. potential future logging camps and what not) and draw pictures of all the archaeological artifacts. He was eventually replaced by a camera.

I went to a talk about dinosaurs once. Apparently you can volunteer for digs. But you have to work your way up if you want to work on fossils.

Does anyone have any experience with this and what it entails?

They both do digging and restoring, but only paleontologists study dinosaurs.

In this case, we got lucky that the skin was fossilized enough to be durable enough to be exposed (with a lot of care I'm sure). But I wonder how much fossil data in the loose surrounding soil is lost being swept away in the standard process of getting to the bones. For example, if one could apply a 3D scanner/sensor which could pick out density/composition around the bones before they were removed from the earth, what forms would we then be able to see...

Most things that die are quickly picked clean to the bones by scavengers, insects, etc. I doubt for a normal skeleton there's much left around it.

But cases where that information is preserved are probably more prevalent that this case where the soft tissue was fossilized by harder minerals.

So I would guess in terms of probability of occurence: skin-hard-fossilized < soft-tissue-soft "fossilized" < picked clean...

Jesus. I had to convert to weeks to get an idea and it's 5 years of about 27 hours a week, and that's just the average.

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