Jennifer Cavin, Fossil Preparator at John Day Fossil Beds

Collecting fossils in the Turtle Cove Formation. NPS.

Jennifer Cavin, with more than 20 years in paleontology labs, is the fossil preparator at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument (JODA), Oregon.

Her path

• Education: a B.S. in biology (minor in geology) from Chadron State College, Nebraska, then an M.S. in paleontology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology under Dr. James E. Martin, describing a Pleistocene fossil site (45,000–9,500 years old) in Nebraska's Sand Hills.
• The Pig Dig: summers at the famous Pig Dig in Badlands National Park gave her a love of Cenozoic mammals (the last 66 million years), especially those of the Oligocene (34–23 million years ago).
• Dinosaurs: lab and field work in Illinois and Utah.
• JODA: in September 2008 she joined the Park Service to work on mammals from the Eocene to the Pliocene (56–3 million years ago) — at the time the only full-time permanent fossil preparator in the entire Park Service.

Preparing a fossil in the JODA laboratory. NPS.

What a preparator does

Fossils rarely come out of the ground pristine; most are still encased in rock. A preparator:

• removes the surrounding rock, mechanically or chemically;
• repairs damage from the time of fossilization to discovery;
• thinks like a time traveler — how the fossil formed and was buried, and how today's treatment will affect it years from now;
• documents every treatment and keeps it reversible where possible.

A single specimen can take upwards of 100 hours. Without that work, researchers couldn't study fossils and museum displays would be far less exciting. Recently, Point Reyes National Seashore asked JODA's chief of paleontology, Dr. Nicholas Famoso, for Cavin's help: after 150 hours of preparation, a block of rock has revealed a dolphin skull, now under study.

The park

JODA preserves one of the world's longest, most continuous fossil records of the Cenozoic "Age of Mammals," spanning almost 50 million years, in three units:

The Thomas Condon Paleontology Center. NPS.

At the Condon Center, visitors can look into the lab and collections, walk a gallery of fossils and murals tracing eastern Oregon's changing climate — and wave to Cavin at work. Just don't tap the glass.

Preparing an oreodont skull as visitors watch. NPS.

Sources

Based on "Jennifer Cavin, Fossil Preparator at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument," Park Paleontology News (Fall 2020), National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. More: JODA geodiversity · park home.