Wylie, Caitlin Donahue (Author)
Those awe-inspiring dinosaur skeletons on display in museums do not spring fully assembled from the earth. Technicians known as preparators have painstakingly removed the fossils from rock, repaired broken bones, and reconstructed missing pieces to create them. These specimens are foundational evidence for paleontologists, and yet the work and workers in fossil preparation labs go largely unacknowledged in publications and specimen records. In this book, Caitlin Wylie investigates the skilled labor of fossil preparators and argues for a new model of science that includes all research work and workers. Drawing on ethnographic observations and interviews, Wylie shows that the everyday work of fossil preparation requires creativity, problem-solving, and craft. She finds that preparators privilege their own skills over technology and that scientists prefer to rely on these trusted technicians rather than new technologies. Wylie examines how fossil preparators decide what fossils, and therefore dinosaurs, look like; how labor relations between interdependent yet hierarchically unequal collaborators influence scientific practice; how some museums display preparators at work behind glass, as if they were another exhibit; and how these workers learn their skills without formal training or scientific credentials. The work of preparing specimens is a crucial component of scientific research, although it leaves few written traces. Wylie argues that the paleontology research community's social structure demonstrates how other sciences might incorporate non-scientists into research work, empowering and educating both scientists and nonscientists.
...MoreReview Max Dresow (2023) Review of "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work behind the Scenes". Metascience: An International Review Journal for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science (pp. 181-184).
Review Irina Podgorny (2023) Review of "Preparing Dinosaurs: The Work behind the Scenes". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 215-216).
Book
Lukas Rieppel;
(2019)
Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle
(/isis/citation/CBB932931396/)
Book
Ina Heumann;
Holger Stoecker;
Marco Tamborini;
Mareike Vennen;
(2018)
Dinosaurierfragmente: Zur Geschichte der Tendaguru-Expedition und ihrer Objekte, 1906-2018
(/isis/citation/CBB168836588/)
Article
Caitlin Donahue Wylie;
(2019)
The Plurality of Assumptions About Fossils and Time
(/isis/citation/CBB797967022/)
Article
Smith, Kerri;
(2012)
China's Dinosaur Hunter: The Ground Breaker
(/isis/citation/CBB001320439/)
Article
Caitlin Donahue Wylie;
(2015)
‘The Artist’s Piece Is Already in the Stone’: Constructing Creativity in Paleontology Laboratories
(/isis/citation/CBB811343626/)
Article
Elizabeth D. Jones;
(2019)
Assumptions of Authority: The Story of Sue the T-Rex and Controversy Over Access to Fossils
(/isis/citation/CBB334696047/)
Article
Pelayo, F.;
(2007)
La evolución humana y su difusión en España en el marco de la JAE (1907--1939)
(/isis/citation/CBB000831518/)
Book
Rich, Thomas H.;
Vickers-Rich, Patricia;
(2003)
A Century of Australian Dinosaurs
(/isis/citation/CBB000950018/)
Article
Lukas Rieppel;
(October 2020)
How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric
(/isis/citation/CBB930265407/)
Book
Sliggers, Bert;
(2006)
Dino's en Draken: Fossielen in Mythen en Volksgeloof
(/isis/citation/CBB001031845/)
Article
Jordan D. II Marché;
(2019)
“Giant Birds of Old”: An 1837 poem by James Dwight Dana (?) on the supposed makers of the Connecticut Valley's fossil trackways
(/isis/citation/CBB796867178/)
Book
Donald R. Prothero;
(2018)
The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB293277728/)
Thesis
Marlena Briane Cameron;
(2017)
Fossil Excavation, Museums, and Wyoming: American Paleontology, 1870-1915
(/isis/citation/CBB144188127/)
Book
Rich, Thomas H. V.;
Rich, Pat Vickers;
(2000)
Dinosaurs of darkness
(/isis/citation/CBB000101955/)
Article
Glendening, John;
(2009)
“The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus”: A Nineteenth-Century Problematic and Its Representations
(/isis/citation/CBB001213333/)
Book
Mayor, Adrienne;
(2011)
The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
(/isis/citation/CBB001550088/)
Thesis
Rieppel, Lukas Benjamin;
(2012)
Dinosaurs: Assembling an Icon of Science
(/isis/citation/CBB001567402/)
Book
Dingus, Lowell;
Norell, Mark A.;
(2010)
Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex
(/isis/citation/CBB001023269/)
Book
Ilja Nieuwland;
(2019)
American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie’s Plaster Diplodocus
(/isis/citation/CBB424808631/)
Book
Richard Fallon;
(2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
(/isis/citation/CBB569188287/)
Be the first to comment!