When you drive around the outskirts of Paterson, New Jersey, past windowless taverns with scarred metal doors and warehouses on weed-wild lots, one of the last things you might expect to find is dinosaur fossils. And yet, pull into the driveway of a former foundry, push through the door and into an 11,000-square-foot studio with ceilings higher than the average church, and there they are: the fossil bones of Samson, one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever discovered.
This is the domain of Phil Fraley Productions, a fossil preparation and exhibit fabrication company—a realm of chisels and dust and glue, of long hours and, truth be told, as much art as science. Phil Fraley, 54, has been assembling dinosaur skeletons and preparing exhibits for the nation's top museums for 25 years. He directed a team that built a 40,000-cubic-foot rain forest for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and he has engineered everything from replicas of the leaves and buds of a groundnut vine at the Montauk Point Lighthouse Museum to the skeletal mount for Sue, the world's largest T. rex, at the Field Museum in Chicago.
Fraley, aided by his business partner and wife, Carol, surrounds himself with a team of young artists with strong visual sensibilities and experience with the construction techniques essential to dinosaur assembly. "We see things a little bit differently than scientists or researchers do," he says. "Researchers will spend the majority of their life examining a very small piece of an entire specimen, say the inner ear or the interior of the brain cavity, looking for morphological differences. But what they don't see is the overall picture, the overall animal. That's where we have an advantage."
Samson's bones came to Fraley in 2004, 12 years after members of the Detrich Fossil Company found them in South Dakota. The fossil hunters unearthed about 55 percent of the 65-million-year-old skeleton—encased in a mixture of mud and sand known in paleontological jargon as the matrix—and sold it to the British businessman Graham Lacey, reportedly for $5 million to $8 million. Lacey has yet to reveal where Samson's permanent home will be. In the meantime he has entrusted Fraley with the job of cleaning and assembling the skeleton for eventual display.
The first task for Fraley's team was to separate the bones from the matrix, an arduous cleaning process known as gross preparation. For months they sat at worktables and hunched over a parade of bones. The tool of choice is called an air scribe, essentially a handheld jackhammer with the look and sound of a dentist's drill that gently, incrementally chips the matrix off the fossil. Some matrix, like sandstone, comes away so cleanly and easily that it seems to jump free of its own volition. Other types can be tricky: Ironstone is often unyielding and so closely grafted to the fossil that it's difficult to tell where the bone ends and the matrix begins.
