It took the researchers 14 days to excavate the find and bring it back in separate enormous blocks to the museum. There, senior preparation technician Mark Mitchell was tasked with separating the fossil from the stone. This was no small endeavor, taking Mitchell seven hours per day over five and a half years. That task, he wrote in an email, took him a staggering 7,000 hours.
Is just staggering. I'm old(ish), and not in the frantic startup-race culture that's sometimes pervasive here, but still find it really hard to imagine going to work and spending all day chipping at rocks, for over 5 years straight. I feel they did the right thing when naming the dinosaur after him. Respect.
Speaking of interesting dinosaur names, my other favorite has got to be the Atlascopcosaurus [1], named after Swedish industry tooling company Atlas Copco [2] who sponsored the particular dig (in 1984) when it was found with equipment.