Meet Deb Wagner, Petrified Forest National Park's Paleontology Lab Manager

Deb Wagner in the fossil preparation lab with a large, partly prepared Smilosuchus (phytosaur) skull nicknamed "Renaldo". NPS photo by Deb Wagner.

Deb Wagner was hired in May 2020 to run the fossil preparation lab at Petrified Forest National Park, Arizona. Her title is Museum Specialist; in practice she is the park's lead preparator and lab manager, preparing Late Triassic fossils of every size, keeping the lab equipped, and tracking newly collected specimens. This profile, by Wagner and Diana Boudreau, appeared in Park Paleontology News in spring 2021.

Why Petrified Forest

The National Park Service had long been part of her life: early holidays in the Great Smoky Mountains and Mammoth Cave, and a teenage trip to Big Bend, left her wanting to see as many parks as she could. She first visited Petrified Forest nearly 20 years before, on a summer road trip that took in 15 parks, and felt a strong connection to it. Through her career she had used the NPS Museum Management Program's Museum Handbook and Conserve-O-Grams.

What drew her most was the Triassic: a time of rich diversity, when many strange vertebrates evolved to fill different niches. Preparing a specimen without knowing what will emerge is, she says, exciting.

The job

Starting a new job and an interstate move in a pandemic made everything harder, and limits on how many people could share the lab made teamwork difficult, though not impossible. Her days begin with email, checking the labs, and talking with the museum curator and paleontologist about research priorities and preparation plans. She spends less time at the microscope than she would like.

Her biggest project so far has been molding and casting a 3-foot-long Smilosuchus skull, daunting for someone who had mostly worked on very small animals, but a chance to refine her methods and try new materials. Her first specimen from the park was a dinosauriform shoulder blade (scapulocoracoid), a rarity there, and she has worked on nearly all the "-saurs", from aetosaurs to pterosaurs and trilophosaurs.

The final four-part mould is removed from the back half of a Smilosuchus skull after hours of planning and construction. NPS photo by Diana Boudreau.

A specialist in small fossils

Wagner specialises in micropreparation: preparing fossils by hand at a level of detail that needs a microscope, most often very small ones, such as tiny rodent or lizard jaws.

Micropreparation takes high-powered microscopes, sharp tools and a steady hand. The monitor shows an aetosaur jaw bone (maxilla) as Wagner removes the surrounding rock. NPS photo by Deb Wagner.

How she got there

• A class called "History of Life" in her senior year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sparked her interest in paleontology, as she was about to graduate in biochemistry knowing it was not for her.
• She volunteered at the Field Museum in Chicago, was trained in vertebrate fossil preparation, and was soon hired. In 9 years there she worked on specimens from the Ordovician to the present, from every continent including Antarctica, and went to Beijing to begin preparing a large long-necked reptile, Tanystropheus, and train Chinese technicians to continue the work.
• She earned an M.S. in Museum and Field Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, working as a fossil preparator and a collections assistant in vertebrate paleontology and zoology, which deepened her commitment to conserving collections.
• In 2014 she joined the team renovating the National Fossil Hall at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, then became chief preparator and lab manager at the University of Texas at Austin, before coming to Petrified Forest.

Her most memorable moments are moments of discovery: the shared excitement in a quarry when something unexpected turns up, or piecing together a mystery with researchers in the lab. Her advice is to follow your passion: volunteer at a museum or university if you can, join a STEAM programme if you are young, and get outside: when you see a plant or animal you do not know, observe it and look it up when you get home.

Sources

• Deb Wagner and Diana Boudreau, "Meet Deb Wagner—Petrified Forest National Park's Paleontology Lab Manager," Park Paleontology News 13, no. 1 (spring 2021), National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/dwagner-pefo-lab-manager.htm
• More: Petrified Forest National Park; NPS fossils and paleontology.