Mounts and Materials
Otto Falkenbach working on mounted Palaeoscincus specimen, 1922. Elisabeth Rungius Fulda/© AMNH
Providing proper building or room conditions and good cabinetry will go a long way towards preserving fossil specimens, but the housing of individual specimens is also an essential element and one that often requires much more customized care.
A good example of this housing, which is known as a storage mount, will not only support the specimen in storage and prevent gravity from taking its toll, but will also minimize vibration from the movement of compactor shelving or cabinet drawers, and ideally reduce handling, or at least promote safe handling.
Making the Most of Outside Help
Making storage mounts and rehousing specimens is an area of collections management where volunteers or interns with sensitivity to the safety of the specimens, good collections care experience, and good hand-eye coordination and manual skills can make a huge impact on the long-term care of a collection. There are many skills that can be brought in from outside the museum and university community by volunteers, such as a background in handicrafts, which can be combined with training from collection care professionals to address complex problems in specimen housing.
The best materials to use for making mounts are inert, meaning non-reactive and not prone to off-gassing. There are many suppliers of these archival preservation grade materials and they can easily be bought in small quantities by individual collectors. Institutions undertaking large re-housing projects can arrange for bulk purchases.
Specimens in storage can suffer a number of types of mechanical damage:
- An irregular shaped object placed on a flat surface rests on only a few points of contact resulting in crushing and abrasion at these points
- Gravity can cause specimens to break under their own weight
- Vibrations can be transmitted to specimens
- Moving cabinet drawers can cause specimens to roll or slide into each other or the drawers
- Dragging heavy specimens on shelves can cause abrasions
Care should be taken when packing fossils to ensure damage does not occur during storage.
Whether specimens are housed in vials, trays, boxes, pallets, or shelves, properly designed supports can help reduce these problems by:
- Supporting the specimen as completely as possible
- Limiting movement of the specimen in any direction
- Padding the specimen to limit shocks and vibrations
Safe versus unsafe materials for storage mounts
GENERALLY SAFE FOR LONG-TERM HOUSING |
MIGHT OFF-GASS OR EXUDE: AVOID IF POSSIBLE |
|---|---|
Polyethylene |
Formaldehyde |
Polypropylene |
Acids |
Polystyrene |
Peroxides |
Natural unbleached cotton |
Amines |
Acid-free paper |
Plasticizers |
Mylar |
Migrating dyes |
Acrylics |
|
If you are planning on buying a new storage material and want to check what chemicals have been used in its manufacture, it’s a good idea to contact the manufacturer directly. An alternative to this is to look up the material’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS). Copies of these can be found on the internet fairly easily using search engines like Google—enter the product name and ‘MSDS.’
These Collection Management resources were originally developed in 2007 with the support of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
