With large blocks it is often necessary to paste into the jacket, on upper or both sides, boards, scantling or sticks of wood to secure additional rigidity.

For should the block "rack," or become shattered inside, even though no fragments were lost, the specimen would be more or less completely ruined.
[Illustration: Fig.

41 .-- A Dinosaur skeleton, prospected and ready for encasing in plaster bandages and removal in blocks.
(_Corythosaurus_, Red Deer River, Alberta.)] The next stage will be packing in boxes with straw, hay or other materials, hauling to the railway and shipment to New York.
Arrived at the Museum, the boxes are unpacked, each block laid out on a table, the upper side of its plaster jacket softened with water and cut away, and the preparation of the bone begins.

Always it is more or less cracked and broken up, but the fragments lie in their natural relations.

Each piece must be lifted out, thoroughly cleaned from rock and dirt, and the fractured surfaces cemented together again.