eli5: Do you have to carve Fossils out of the stone or will they pop out in the form they are in, when the stone it split open?
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I have not done this myself, but I used to have a couple of friends that did this stuff.
In my area, when a construction project hits fossils, they have to stop and let a local university have some time to examine the area and remove anything of interest. Around here, the fossils are mostly sea creatures and not that interesting to the universities.
After they are done, they will let locals go in and remove fossil matrix for their own collections.
When they were cleaning up the fossils, they would chip away some of the stone. The rest of the stone was removed using Muriatic acid brushed on to the stone. The acid would typically dilute before it started attacking the fossil materials.
So, with a combination of chipping, acid, brushing and a few other mild abrasive techniques, they would clean the fossils out of the matrix.
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