Christian Sidor, UW Biology professor and curator of the Burke Museum's vertebrate paleotology department, was recently featured in a UW Magazine article on a new giant clam fossil acquired by the Burke, named Chowder. 

Excerpt from UW Magazine:

Among the feast of fossils at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, one of the newer additions is a 4.5-foot-long, 80-million-year-old giant clam the museum staff have affectionately dubbed “Chowder.”

Christian Sidor, curator of the Burke’s vertebrate paleontology department, had been looking for holes in the museum’s collection when he reached out to longtime collaborator and fossil hunter Anthony Maltese. Maltese has access to privately-owned fossil sites across the Midwest and had discovered the clam a few years earlier in the chalk deposits of western Kansas, an area that was covered with an inland sea during the Cretaceous period.

“He was keeping it to give to the right museum,” says Kelsie Abrams, fossil lab manager at the Burke (pictured at top).

Last summer, during the Burke team’s fieldwork season, Maltese handed Chowder over to Sidor and Abrams. The bivalve came shattered, in bags filled with dirt and rocks—a prehistoric jigsaw puzzle.

Back in Seattle, and over many months, Abrams led the restoration with the help of more than a dozen volunteers. “Altogether, it took about 400 hours,” she says. “I think I spent about 140 hours on it just myself.” She would hand a volunteer a plastic sack and say, “Here’s a bag of clam, go find out where the pieces go.”

Read the full article in UW Magazine.