Processes, Tasks, and Procedures (Sarah Azmal)

The processes, tasks, and procedures that I do for my internship is first to digitize not only vertebrae but also invertebrate fossils. The reason on why we digitize fossils is so that it could go on a website (idigpaleo) where paleontologist all over the world could be able to access the types of fossils that are inside the Peabody rather than them having to come all the way over here. How we digitize the fossils is placing them on a black screen where we kind play around on how we want the fossils to look like when we take the picture. Once we are satisfied with how we placed the fossils then we would start taking pictures from a device that takes it for us using a program on a computer. The camera doesn't just one picture but takes multiple. Once the pictures are taken we render all the photos into one photo that would soon go onto the website (idigpaleo).

 Another task that I do is cataloging. Now cataloging is so that all of the fossils are inside of a system where it would be easy to track down if someone needed a specific species of fossils. How I catalog is all done on a program called EMU ( I think). I first identify where the species is located which is always located the Peabody and then I create a weblink for the fossil. How I do that is I first take the 5 numbers of the fossil and plug it into the program it would always give me a location of where the fossil was originally from. I copy and paste it into a new web link and create a new number and easily that's the new weblink for that fossil. Next step is if the fossil isn't classified as a species we would then look into whether it is level classified as family,class, etc and then also classify it as undetermined or not.

 What we also do as a task is 3d scan fossils. I haven't worked with 3d scanning as much as I did with digitizing and cataloging. But to sum it up what we did was take 2 separate fossils and place them in a position where it would stand so it could be scanned. Scanning would take about 10-60 minutes depending on what parts you would be scanning. Next, there would be parts of the fossil where it's not fully done meaning there are parts where there are holes and patches. If that happens more scanning would be done on specific parts. Once scanning is done we would start by attaching all the scans together into on fossil. The process in attaching the scans is you would take a pin and you would have to pinpoint a place of the fossil and try to figure out where the pin you placed on scan onto the other and you would have to do this 3 times. After the 3 times, you would have the fossil in 3d form.