Denver Museum of Nature and Science

Hello, my name is Zach Arend, and I am an Astronomy major and Geology minor in the class of 2025. This summer, I am working at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a fossil preparator. Some days involve tedious work scraping layers of rock away from ancient fossil, and other days are spent making cradles for the bones long-term storage. I specifically work with fossils from the Hell Creek formation in North Dakota, which includes the T-rex, Triceratops, and Edmontosaurus. These fossils are from the late Cretaceous period (about 66 million years ago), which is right before the asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula caused the extinction of all non-avian dinosaurs.

My big project this summer has been to prepare a three and a half foot triceratops horn. This has been a very challenging but rewarding process which I have done start to finish nearly all by myself. I have learned how to fully prepare a fossil, from its discovery and unearthing, to transportation, repair, cleaning, storage, and display in the museum. Every day I work mostly on my own projects but am often asked to help others as many stages of preparation require multiple people. This has allowed me to work with many kinds of fossils such as dinosaur limbs, ribs, skulls, teeth, horns, leaf fossils, turtle shells, and many others, each have their own preparation techniques, challenges, and materials. It has also allowed me to strengthen my skills in working with others in a variety of different situations.

I got the opportunity to travel to the Hell Creek formation in North Dakota for a week with fellow interns and museum staff. This was an amazing opportunity as I got to work alongside experts in the field. I was able to learn how to look for fossils, how to safely extract them from the ground, and prepare them for transport back to the museum. Hell Creek is also one of the only places in the world where you can see the ash layer from the asteroid (k/t boundary) which was an amazing experience to see and learn about.

This internship allowed me to see what it was like to work in a lab setting, where I thoroughly enjoyed myself and could see myself working in the future. It also helped remind me how much I enjoy doing hands on work and how much I like problem solving, alone and with others. Overall, it was very beneficial to my Whitman career, as I was able to do a little bit of everything, I learned a lot about something that I had very little knowledge about beforehand, got to work both inside and outside, and was able to work with others and alone solving a variety of problems.

The internship was much more connected to my minor than my major, as I have yet to take a paleontology class, however it was still very valuable to further my overall scientific knowledge and understanding of the world around us and its distant past. Most importantly, I had a ton of fun and met a lot of very interesting and wonderful people who I will stay in contact with as I continue my education.