"l find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight."

Frankly, this feels like my career right now :D (i.e. kinda senior in an individual contributor role without a daily team collaboratin as such, which means I don't have to run around doing standups, but have gazillion lines of code to maintain and not much time for greenfield development).

> [I] find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.

Honestly, this seems like a refreshingly honest take on life. Pounding rocks like a convict, is where its at! No?

I've often wondered, in a situation like this, how does one distinguish between fossil and the surrounding matrix? I mean, it's all rock, no? How can you be sure that the shape you end up with is the shape of the fossilized thing and not a reflection of the excavator's latent sculpting talent?

a) That's why they are a specialist. They are trained in the techniques to differentiate the fossil structure from the surrounding matrix (to the best of their ability). One of the biggest differences is texture; bone is very porous relative to most rock. Under a microscope that difference is much more apparent. You can also lick it because the porous texture of fossil sticks to your tongue more than the surrounding rock, but I doubt he did that.

b) Thats also why it took 7000 hours to do. It's really fucking hard, and he wanted to get it as right as possible. That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.

> That means going very slow, taking a lot of care, and not taking shortcuts to put sculpting into play.

And licking it, it seems :)

How many licks to be licked to perfection ? :p

It normally isn't that hard. The rock and fossil parts look very different. Go to anyplace where you are allowed to take fossil rocks and do it yourself. It isn't hard to visually see where the rock (limestone ends and the fossil starts. Any 3rd grader can do a reasonable job of separating rock from fossil. There are parks like that all over - most fossils are just another clam (or similar sea creature) of the same type experts have seen millions (billions?) of and so there is nothing interesting left to discover.

Note, do not let the above take away the work experts do. While a 8 year old can do it, those are the easy cases, and a few "hammer slips" don't matter. There is a level of detail that trained hands can do better. There are many types of rocks that can hold fossils, and not all are easy as limestone to work with (limestone is the majority though).

> so there is nothing interesting left to discover

Not true (see OP!), but the odds of finding something interesting are very small.

I feel like I’d take that job in a heartbeat if it paid similar to SW engineering

I guess he discovered himself the specimen bit by bit while doing it, which makes the job not boring.

To be honest, there are 1000 ways to see this work, and he probably had a very different view of what he was doing than "chipping a the same rock for 5 years". Here is a proposal that might be closer to what he was feeling: carefully revealing a creature no eyes saw since millions of year as carefully as if you were unclothing your first love. With each movements, getting more intimate with it, more familiar with every detail of its skin, until you know its features better than your own. For millions of year, it was encased in cold stone, as a fairy tale princess enclosed in a cold room, that you would be preparing for its first night in the world.

I do not mean to diminish the level of discipline and patience required, just to point that the fantasy you have about your work is much more important than the work itself, and that there is a lot of beauty into that task, certainly much more than in creating data pipelines to decide how to better trick unsuspecting web users to click on ads (and there, again, people who do that kind of thing probably have a very different fantasy than mine).

While I entirely agree with the gist of your comment, if the process of "unclothing my first love" took 7,000 hours, I might have to reconsider.

Props also to the Canadian miners with the sharpness of vision and presence of mind to spot the dinosaur and stop digging:

Despite the pace of operations, one particular shovel operator, Shawn Funk, happened to notice something after taking a big chunk out of the cliff. It was thanks to him and several people within Suncor that operations stopped in that area and the Royal Tyrrell was notified.