Well Dinosaur fossils are discovered in
lots of different ways, you know, all the way from just starting up casual
encounters by people who aren't paleontologists who find something, to construction sites, to professional big
scale expeditions. So usually if we're just talking about the professional
big scale expeditions like my own expeditions that we spend a good
deal of time just going over maps going over satellite
imagery going over all these different kinds of things to come up with a plan to go to an area
to look for fossils. Most dinosaurs are discovered lying right on the surface, they don't have to all be completely exposed,
in fact it's better if they're not, but if you get a little bit of a tail on a
surface maybe you can dig toward the skull. So, it's very important to
just walk and look and prospect that's the first step in finding dinosaurs. If
you're lucky enough to find a skeleton that's still pretty much buried then you
start the second operation which is called quarrying, and this really involves excavating
as much of the skeleton as you can so at that point you get out your shovels, your chisels, your rock hammers and you try to dig around the skeleton
without damaging the bones so that you can get a sense of how much
of the skeleton is still buried in the ground, and from there, you dig around the perimeter of the
skeletons, so that the bones are sitting up on pedestals that you can put plaster jackets on to protect the
fossils and then dig them out and complete the cast of plaster around
the bones, just like a doctor puts a cast around a broken arm or a broken leg, so that the fossils will be protected on
the trip back to the museum where they can be prepared in more detail.