Anything is Fossil-ble

By Jaelyn Duran

Ben Rotenberg picks and removes the matrix during preparation work. “It’s incredible. It’s like digging for buried treasure everyday,” Rotenberg said. Photo by Jaelyn Duran

Senior Ben Rotenberg traveled to Montana last summer to work as a sound technician on a documentary his good friend and senior Amalie Seyffert is filming.

It was all about a 30-foot dinosaur. A gryposaurus with 78 million year old fossilized bones.

Little did Rotenberg know, he would be returning to Chapman to prepare those very bones for future scientists.

“I was like, I need to jump on this opportunity because this only comes around once in a lifetime and I’ve been here ever since,” Rotenberg said.

Where?

Hashinger Science Center Lab Room 121. And the public is welcome to come take a look.

When Rotenberg isn’t in class, you can find him in the lab working on those bones. Which could help become only the second such skeleton completed in the world.

The lab is not just the home now for all things dinosaur on campus. It’s also a place for students such as Rotenberg and Seyffert to discover a new career interest and connect their major studies to newfound curiosities in natural sciences.

Here is how this all started:

Research paleontologist Jack Horner joined Chapman in 2016 as a presidential fellow, teaching two courses in the Honors Program. Every summer, Horner invites students to join him and his colleagues on a trip to the Montana Badlands, one of the best places to discover dinosaur fossils. That’s where the gryposaurus discovery all started in summer 2021.

Knowing there were more pieces of the same dinosaur that needed excavation, Horner returned the following summer where he invited Seyffert to bring a crew, Rotenberg and co-director Flo Singer, to start filming a documentary.

Aside from the film, Seyffert and Rotenberg also got their hands dirty as they helped free the fossils from the sediment where a crew then carefully wrapped the specimen in a 4,000-pound plaster jacket for transportation. Because it is property of the Badlands, items are donated to museums and universities for study and exhibition.

This specimen will belong to the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington for display.

A 2022 graduate Sarah Wallace discovered the first gryposaurus bone on the 2021 dig which is now known as dream bone.

But with its permission, it is being studied and prepared at Chapman. The jacket was first transported to the Cooper Center, an archeological warehouse in Santa Ana, and then eventually moved into the Hashinger lab in October.

“For Chapman, it’s the first dinosaur that’s ever been here so it’s a cool thing for students to see,” Horner said. “It beats just looking at your phone right?”

At this stage in the process, they are figuring out information about the environment the animal lived in and new ways to extract these specimens out of the sediment. Horner describes these as things “you just can’t go on the web and get an answer to.”

Horner’s main goal is to connect his students to science, especially because a majority of them are not science-related majors. He stressed the point that humans have become more disconnected from nature and it’s important for us to reconnect to be knowledgeable about the history of the world.

“But more than anything, the whole idea of science is to learn new things. And in order to learn, you have to be curious about things to begin with,” Horner said.

The end goal for Horner is to not only find the rest of the dinosaur and reattach everybody to nature, but for Chapman to have something dedicated to the paleontological field. Because these objects are in public trust and we don’t have a facility, the fossils will eventually make their way back home for exhibition at the Burke Museum.

“We don’t have a museum here but we’d like to have one. And we can’t. We’ll never get one until people understand that we could have things like this here,” Horner said.

Horner and Rotenberg forecast preparation to be complete by this summer and will make their way back to Montana to look for more. So it is up in the air for how long the dinosaur bones will be at Chapman before departure. Ultimately, it’s up to the Burke Museum leaders when they want them back.

However, before they go, Horner plans to have them 3D printed at the Fowler School of Engineering. This is so that Chapman will have replicas and continue to educate and fascinate future students with them.

Seyffert, a documentary filmmaking major, stumbled upon this project when Wallace and Horner approached her to join the dig and film a documentary. After applying for various grants and discussing the project with Horner and president Struppa, Seyffert was on her way to Montana the upcoming summer.

“I never thought I would be making a film about dinosaurs but it was the type of thing when Jack came and presented it as a concept I was like, ‘oh yeah dinosaurs are really interesting and cool and I would love to learn about them’,” Seyffert said.

Initially, Horner pitched to Seyffert the idea of women in paleontology, as it is a male-dominated space, but there are several angles the documentary can take. There is yet to be a film of the entire process from excavation to a completed skeleton, so Seyffert and Singer are open to exploring all options. For now, they plan to continue the documentary and join the Montana dig again this summer.

Being in charge of this project, Seyffert wants students to have that genuine human and academic curiosity. She hopes students are walking by the lab or watching the documentary down the line and thinking to themselves ‘wow this is really cool’.

“I hope that students can feel inspired in the same way I’ve felt inspired by becoming involved in natural sciences. It’s very cool and fun to feel like sciences are actually accessible,” Seyffert said.

Seyffert shared that sciences in middle and high school were almost intimidating and she felt that there was not much support in those departments. So, being able to use interdisciplinary learning here at Chapman and delve back into natural sciences, Seyffert appreciates learning paleontology in such an engaging way.

“It’s been a very surreal journey learning about dinosaurs in my everyday life when I was the type of person who thought I would not be engaging with science for the rest of my life,” Seyffert said.

Rotenberg didn’t either.

Rotenberg, a screen acting major, attended the dig in 2022 to work alongside Seyffert, but he says he did little to no sound work during the trip. Instead, Rotenberg found himself fully immersed into the experience of the continued Gryposaurus dig and Horner hired him to continue the work.

“I spent most of my time, as you can see, on this specimen and I really just kind of fell in love with the work,” Rotenberg said.

As a kid, it’s fair to say Rotenberg was kind of obsessed with dinosaurs and it stood peripheral in his life. But he never became a scientist or a dinosaur researcher. His job is to “make the bones look pretty” and that’s his expertise when it comes to dinosaurs.

Rotenberg said, “I have like hundreds of photos being just covered in dinosaur stuff and I never thought I would be able to actually work with them.”

During preparation work, Rotenberg follows four steps:

1. remove the matrix (mudstone, rock, dirt, etc.)

2. remove the fossil/s from the jacket

3. clean up the fossil/s

4. glue together the pieces that make up the entire bone

This is the extent of Rotenberg’s job but it’s the work he enjoys and hopes to continue to do.

“It’s been a great time. It’s kind of unbelievable…it’s pretty cool to get to go to work and work on dinosaur bones every day,” Rotenberg said.