The museum also operates (jointly with UNESCO) a school for museum technicians.
After the lead-lined machine was installed inside the museum, technicians spent another day attaching the peripheral equipment.
The museum technicians drew on fossils from the site in La Ferrassie in France for much of the rest of the skeleton, notably the skull.
The bones came into the Grant collection in the late 19th century, and the skeleton was mounted – the only mounted specimen in the UK – by museum technicians in 1911, but not very well.
On a recent rainy afternoon, Abby Sohn and Angela Yvarra, museum conservation technicians clad in laboratory coats, carefully vacuumed a Sioux buffalo robe before packing it.
"This is good stuff," said Anibal Rodriguez, a senior technician in the museum's anthropology department.
"It's so awesome, you know — and it's mine!" A few feet downstream, Chuck Dishian, an audiovisual technician at the museum, perched on a milk crate that he'd brought from home.
Six months after graduation, the most common category of employment for U.K. biology graduates was "retail, catering, waiting and bar staff" (21.9%), followed by "other professionals, associate professionals and technicians"—a broad range of positions that included museum curators, biodiversity officers, and microbiology technicians (16.5%).
So technicians at the museum, working with the skill and patience of reconstructive surgeons, assembled a full skeleton from the exact casts of fossil parts from several specimensfound in Europe and the Middle East.
