The Mini Museum Library - Articles, Essays, Specimen Deep Dives, and Current Research

A Tyrannosaurus Rex Ink Update!

August 24, 2021

Hello, everyone!

We have an exciting update about our new book, Relics: A History of the World Told in 133 Objects! First of all, a HUGE thank you to everyone that's already pre-ordered! We were blown away by the amount of people who helped support us in publishing this new book and we're honored that we'll soon be a much loved part of your bookshelf!

Now for some major news! We have a new update to share on the Tyrannosaurus Rex bone ink stamp that's coming as an added bonus with every book ordered directly from our shop!

We've been working with a scientific milling lab, AVEKA, to grind the fossils down to a fine powder and last week we received the first samples! This powder looks amazing and we're so excited to infuse our ink with it and start our test run of stamping.

The Dinosaur Bones After Milling

Above: Our super fine dino powder under the microscope! Check out that 4000x magnification!

The researchers at AVEKA were able to get this material down to sub 90 micrometers (That's thinner than a strand of hair!), and a chemical analysis shows that powder was dominated by hydroxyapatite, the mineral that makes up most of the composition of bone.

Here's what Dr. Charles Bowman from AVEKA had to say about the bones: "No Fluorine was detected, so I guess that communities weren’t using Fluoride to strengthen their teeth or bones 65 million years ago. Admittedly, I was surprised to see that the dino bone had remained, even after 65 million years, essentially unchanged from the original bone. Or so it would appear chemically."

AVEKA is using a specialized cryogenic grinder to grind the specimen down to size. The fossil is placed into a sealed vial which is then cooled with liquid nitrogen. Once that's ready, the vial is pushed back and forth by powerful magnets which pulverizes the sample inside to an extremely fine powder. If you wanna check out the full process, you can see this video about the type of grinder being used!

With this material, we'll be able to infuse our ink and create a truly unique powdered T. Rex stamp!

Every order of Relics direct from our shop will include one of these stamps as an added bonus on top of the book, so you can pre-order it right now to get your own! We don't know of many other books that can boast a feature like that!