and we're here in the paleontology lab at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Once fossils come out of the field, they come to places like this, where folks like Ishelle, who are volunteers, prepare the fossils.

And she's working on the skull of a Ichthyosaur, a prehistoric marine reptile that swam in the seas during the Triassic time period, 240 million years ago.

So this specimen was buried for 240 million years.

It was discovered by paleontologists, brought back to Los Angeles, and it will take months to maybe a year or more to prepare this skull so it can be studied.

And to prepare the fossils, that means they use a range of tools-- sometimes air abrasives, sometimes tools that you might recognize, a toothbrush, for example... or a dental pick, which you might have seen at the dentist's office.

And it's with this range of tools that Ishelle is removing the rock, revealing the fossil, and once it's fully revealed, it is given a specimen number, a card is written up about it, and then it is time to transport the fossil into the collections.

And it's at that point, that the research truly begins.