Originally published at: YouTuber restores 20,000-year-old mammoth tusk | Boing Boing
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Aw, I was hoping he restored it into being a whole wooly mammoth again…
Now that would be a restoration…
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It must be time to reference this John Varley book again. I highly recommend it as a fun science fiction concept.
Mammoth
Multibillionaire Howard Christian is one of the wealthiest – and most eccentric – men in the country. Not content with investing his fortune and watching it grow, he buys rare cars that he actually drives, acquires collectible toys that he actually plays with, and builds buildings that defy the imagination. But now his restless mind has turned to a new obsession: cloning a mammoth…
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Pliocene Park
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Maybe they could put them in some kind of place for people to see them. I’m sure everything would work out great. They could call it “Pleistocene Park.”
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He said the blue mineral deposit, vivianite, was highly sought after but then it looks like he sanded it all away.
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Hmmm… eight posts in and nobody has yet said “what the fuck is a YouTuber doing with something like that, and hamfistedly “restoring” it to boot?”
Gluing the pieces back together and sanding it until it looks nice to a human eye is not “restoring” it. It’s taking fossils that might have had scientific value and turning them into furniture for clicks. 
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Vivianite crystals are something geologists and rock hounds like as specimens, but they have to be more than just a surface discoloration.
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For more details on George Church’s plans, see this book.
What’s more, WTF is all that sanding for? Yeah, to get a smooth surface, I get that. But I’d prefer an ‘as it was found’ example - sanding is just removing original material.
ETA And he thinks bone ash and epoxy is better than stuff used as filler to repair cars? Well, it might give a more aesthetic finish but it hardly counts as ‘restoration’ any more than filling and painting over it will result in a well-restored old car.
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To be fair, now that it is dug up, something drastic has to be done to keep it from turning to dust. I’m guessing epoxy and bone ash is pretty close to what a museum would use to stabilize a fossel.
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Sure. I’d go with the epoxy resin to stabilise (if that is the best material for it) but adding bone ash to fill in holes to improve the ‘look’ and ‘pretend’ to be original … nah.
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