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JENNIFER: The last time we saw this fossil it was still completely covered in rock.
After forty hours of slowly taking down the matrix, you can see that the bone is now completely uncovered.
The next step is to take it out of its plaster jacket.
I can tell already there's a large crack running all the way through the bone here,
so these two pieces will probably definitely come off separately,
and right here there's a little bit of bone that's broken off,
but it's okay if they break, because next step will be to glue it all back together.
( sound of paper ripping )
JENNIFER: It's a little stuck to the toilet paper, but that's easy to remove.
Be sure to get all your little fragments.
( paper ripping )
Okay, the next step will be to clean it up a little bit more,
and using a polyvinyl acetate glue,
glue the two pieces back together,
and then the original humeral head that was found in the field - that fell off the field -
will also be glued back on together,
and you'll see we will have a fairly complete bone.
( paper ripping )
( paper ripping )
I just spent the last four hours deep cleaning the bone a little bit more
after we took it out of the jacket.
As you can see there are three pieces to the bone.
The one break ...
is a very ...
is very clean break and the pieces will fit right back together,
with no distortion at all.
This was the break that was enclosed in the rock, so it's a very clean break.
The second break was the break that was exposed to the surface.
And as you can see this just ...
that there's a lot of dirt still in there that ...
they contain some bone but to remove it you'd lose the bone and ...
so this break probably we're not going to be able to repair,
because there is just some bone missing.
As a side comparison to the pogonodon humerus,
you can see this modern cougar humerous ...
that I'm holding here - you can see it's a much more robust humerus on the pogonodon.
Okay now we're going to glue the good break back together.
I'm using polyvinyl acetate,
which is just a plastic polymer that's dissolved in acetone.
I apply the glue to one side of the bone ...
( laughs )
Then I touch it to where it's going to go to get glue on both sides of the bone, it ...
it creates a stronger bond ...
and then you wait until it dries,
so a couple hours from now, at least, I'd say ...
is the when you want to handle the bone next.
Instead of holding it, you can embed it in a sandbox.
This is one we kind of made here.
and now I'm done.