Three things that will help me be a better scientist

This is a very quick post about three new things I've been doing that help me with my collection and make me a better bone collector. They are techniques that museums and universities use and it's good for me to start using them now because my collection is getting so big it's getting confusing !

The last few weeks I've been catching up and going through my entire collection with them. And the three things are....

Adding identification tags

I have been doing this on some of my skulls but not all. The idea came from Mrs Powell who has brilliant tags on her skulls (like the one above) saying the name, the latin name, and where and when it was found. My tags are red with white stickers, and they give each specimen a unique number which is useful for....

My collection catalogue

I got this idea from Dr and Mrs Todd who are grown up bone collectors from Scotland and who sent me an email about my collection. They said that they catalogued their collection which I thought was a good idea, so I created a template on A4 paper. Each skull or skeleton gets it's own page. Yellow is used for bones I found myself, pink is for gifts and blue is for ones I bought. Dad prints a picture on each page, I add the details and put the number on the sheet and on the label. I haven't finished yet but I've done the first 121.

Adding a scale bar

This was recommended by Victor Sauque who is a PhD student in Spain who is studying dinosaurs. I used to do this ages ago but got out the habit, but now on I am going to try to do it more because it'll be easier to tell the size of specimens at a glance. Museums do this all the time and I'll try and do it now too. There is a post I am going to do in three weeks time where the scale is really, really important.

Thanks for all the advice, and hopefully it will help me becoming a better bone collector !

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