Dry Ice Cleans Dinosaur Bones

The famous movie "Jurassic Park" gave us dramatic dinosaur images, even though they are fiction. In eastern Utah, there are lots of real dinosaur bones in Dinosaur National Monument, an area known internationally for the 100-million-year-old bones, sought by paleontologists (scientists who study prehistoric fossils). The problem is that the bones were preserved by being buried in sandy rock which has become cemented to the bones through the centuries. In order to study the bones, the rock coating needs to be removed, without defacing the precious bone. For many years this meant countless hours of tedious and careful chipping and scraping.

Recently, scientists at the College of Eastern Utah decided to try dry ice blasting to clean the delicate bones. They found it would work. A gentle blasting stream, called dry ice dusting, was used in order to minimize damage to the bones.

Whether you want to remove smoke stain from the antique leather cover of an old book, or ancient river sediment from old dinosaur bones, dry ice blasting saves time, labor, and avoids damage to the substrate being cleaned.

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