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Casting with plaster of Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2017

Loren E. Babcock
Loren E. Babcock*
Affiliation:
Department of Geology, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas 66045
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Extract

Plaster of Paris is a general term for gypsum plasters and gypsum cements. Plaster, which has been in widespread use for producing casts of fossils since the Nineteenth Century (e.g., Green, 1832; Ward, 1866), is easily used for making rigid, long-lasting, and inexpensive casts of study specimens, and for making field casts from natural molds. Good general descriptions of the use of plaster are given in Clarke (1938) and Rich (1947), as well as in many recent books on sculpture (e.g., Miller, 1971; Chaney and Skee, 1973; Andrews, 1983), and in various brochures distributed by manufacturers (e.g., United States Gypsum Company, 1987a, 1987b). Using plaster for casting paleontological specimens was previously discussed in works by Quinn (1940), Keyes (1959), Heintz (1963), Rigby and Clark (1965), Rixon (1976), and Chase (1979).

Type
Replication of Fossils
Information
The Paleontological Society Special Publications , Volume 4: Paleotechniques , 1989 , pp. 320 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Paleontological Society 

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References

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