DALLAS (AP) — Three weeks before his team's fossil finds were to go on display at one of the world's most famous natural history museums, Louis Jacobs stood in a basement lab at Southern Methodist University sanding the lower jaw of a 72-million-year-old sea monster.

The Dallas Morning News reports his colleague Michael Polcyn sat nearby, dabbing sealant on a model of the animal's upper jaw and skull. White dust hovered in the air. Plaster tailbones, skulls and teeth topped every counter.

That was the sort of work — preparing models and fossils — that Jacobs had done early in his career, befor...