Darren Tanke’s Gorgosaurus preparation: final roundup

I have been less than brilliant at cross-linking all the various Gorgosaurus posts that have been running now since December and finished yesterday with Darren’s final summary and update. It seemed sensible then to have a final little round-up on here back linking to all the previous posts and giving a central repository for everything up to this point.

I also want to use the opportunity to repost a few of my favourite images from the series which are scattered in below. Of course I also want to give huge thanks to Darren for all his work on this. I’d originally conceived of the series of being little more than some nice pictures shows the rock slowly clearing to reveal the underlying dinosaur with a few notes on what was going on. Darren obviously has gone way beyond this with a huge series of detailed posts and documenting every step of the process and every little trick and tip he has going. My thanks too, to the Royal Tyrell Museum for letting us do all of this and stick this, as yet undescribed, specimen all over the web.

Right, here we go:

Darren Tanke and Gorgosaurus

Pt. 1 Getting started

Pt. 2 Into the jacket

Pt. 3 The snout appears

Pt. 4 A maxilla

Pt. 5 Fixing the cracks

Pt. 6 A lucky break

Pt. 7 Safety first

Pt. 8 Removal and repair

Pt. 9 Epoxy and a foot is found

Gorgosaurus review and Q & A

Pt. 10 Filling the cracks and a foot uncovered

Pt. 11 A hands-free glue system

Pt. 12 Specimen preparation and planning

Pt. 13 Detailed work

Pt. 14 Until next year

Pt. 15 Finishing touches

Pt. 16 More cleaning

Pt. 17 Supporting the breaks

Pt. 18 That superb skull

Pt. 19 Preparing to mould

Pt. 20 Fixing undercuts, the final preparation

Pt. 21 The end

All photos here and in the series are owned by Darren Tanke and the Royal Tyrrell Museum.

Sometime after this roundup post originally appeared, Darren extended this series with some further work. These are linked to below so that the whole set can be accessed from this single post:

Pt. 22 Trenching

Pt. 23 Drilling

Pt. 24 Jacketing the skull

Pt. 25 Completing the skull jacket

Pt. 26 Numbers

Pt. 27 Adding burlap

Pt. 28 Replastering

Pt. 29 Block turning i

Pt. 30 Block turning ii

Pt. 31 Jacket removal i

Pt. 32 Jacket removal ii

Extra final bonus post.