Kim, if I use a preservative on bone the first objective is to get it to
penetrate, since what the preservative is doing is acting to replace the
collagen matrix of the bone, which will degrade over time and especially
if the bones are kept in a heated building.
With bone it is necessary also to choose a preservative that doesn't act,
over time, like an acid. I don't know about nail polish, as I've never
used that; but I find that all the urethane and polyurethane plastics
literally eat the bone up and thus must not be used.
My favorite preservative is a thin mixture (15:1) of top-quality marine
spar varnish mixed with real turpentine, i.e. as opposed to
petroleum-based paint thinner. I put the bones in one of those disposable
aluminum roasting pans that you can buy for a buck at the grocery store,
and then use a bulb-and-tube meat baster to squirt the preservative onto
the bone and then into every orifice.
The bones are then set to dry upon either little stones or painter's
points, over newspaper, outdoors on racks so that there is no problem with
fumes building up inside of a building. The reason for the "points" is
that of course the preservative is going to drool down off of the bones,
so that if you set them down directly onto the newspaper there will be a
puddle of preservative wherever the bone touches the paper which will then
harden and makes sometimes a difficult job to knife it off. If you set the
bone up on points, then you can just pop the points off if they are stuck
at all, and any cleanup with a knife is much less.
I hear, by the way, that DNA folks just hate it when preservative is used
-- so I have avoided its use on anything but my teaching collection, which
is all no-data specimens. But sometimes it seems to me that the choice
lies between using preservative or having the specimen totally crumble to
bits. Since even the best penetrating preservative only goes into the bone
a small distance, I wonder whether DNA samples couldn't be taken anyway by
scraping out material from an interior part of the bone; or whether in the
process of DNA analysis, the chemical "signature" of turpentine and spar
varnish could not in some way be detected and then subtracted from the
overall equation, so to speak. But I am really ignorant of the lab
procedures involved in DNA analysis, and would like to hear from anyone on
the Zooarch list who can advise about this. -- Dr. Deb
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> For a
> clear base on ceramics, I generally have used clear fingernail polish. Is
> there any reason not to use it on bone?
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>
>
> -KIM
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> For a
> clear base on ceramics, I generally have used clear fingernail polish. Is
> there any reason not to use it on bone?
>
>
>
> -KIM
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