In 2004, while attending Woodland Park High School and working part time at Taco Bell, Jacob Jett saw the opportunity of a lifetime taking shape in the heart of town and could not let the moment pass him by.

“Like most kids, I was a little obsessed about dinosaurs,” said Jett. “I loved museums. I read books. I absorbed everything when it came to dinosaurs.

“As a teen, my focus shifted to music. But, after visiting an exhibit at the Woodland Park Library slated for the Resource Center which was still under construction, my passion for paleontology came roaring back, and I knew I wanted to be involved. I actually took a pay cut from my Taco Bell wage to be able to work with dinosaurs. I started a month before the Resource Center opened, and I’ve never looked back.”

The front of the house at the Dinosaur Resource Center is a well-loved museum replete with a gift shop that could be an exhibit itself. While touring the museum displays, visitors pass through an unassuming hallway which allows guests a peek at a real paleontological laboratory where actual fossils are being excavated from bedrock. This is the magic that makes natural history exhibits a reality, and Triebold Paleontology is one of the preeminent privately owned specimen purveyors in the world.

Jett worked his way up the ranks over the years and is now the executive vice president of Triebold Paleontology.

“I never get tired of my job, and I work with some of the greatest people who are just as passionate about what they do,” he said. “We produce exhibit pieces that are not only in museums throughout the United States but around the world.”

Fossils which were prepared or cast right here in Woodland Park are now on display at famous museums like the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History in Washington DC and the National Science Museum in Tokyo, Japan.

Jett said, “My personal favorite is our Daspletosaurus specimen that is the centerpiece of the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History,” Jett said. “But I’m biased on that one because it was one of my first projects that I began working on when I was only 19-years old.”

Though Triebold Paleontology works in conjunction with many universities and museums, it is a private company with private field rights and casting rights.

“We have agreements with landowners in places like South Dakota and Montana,” Jett said. “When fossils of interest are found, we send a team out into the field to collect the specimen and then ship it back to Colorado.

“It is a labor-intensive process where we map out the area to make sure we locate as much of the fossil as we can. It’s a bit like finding animal bones while out on a hike. Often pieces of the skeleton are moved or missing because they’ve been carried away.

“We will leave the bones in the protective bedrock and carefully break that rock from its foundation. Then we wrap it in a field cast—a combination burlap and plaster—to protect it, and once it’s back at our lab, we begin the painstaking process of extracting the bones from the surrounding rock. Large specimens take thousands of man hours and many years to complete.”

Once the specimen is mounted and sold, the landowner gets a commission, and Triebold typically retains casting rights. Scientifically important fossils often land at universities or museums. Fossils that are considered common by these institutions may end up with private collectors.

Because it is very rare to find a complete vertebrate fossil, in years past, missing pieces had to be piecemealed from other known fossils—a technique that was far from an accurate picture of the full specimen—or those pieces needed to be sculpted by an artist. Today, 3D printing technology has revolutionized the process.

“We have the ability to scan and scale bones from digital copies or to create that missing bone from scratch. It gives us the ability to fill in missing pieces or to scale down and create complete miniatures of existing fossils,” said Jett. “These are developing techniques that have opened all kinds of doors and made museum quality replicas easier and more affordable. We have fully embraced this technology.”

A current client has commissioned a museum display of cast pterosaurs in flight, and using digital scans of complete fossils, structural supports have been built into the fossil casts and the bones have been manipulated to create an authentic aesthetic of flight.

Behind the scenes at Triebold Paleontology is a diverse group of scientists, programmers and artists.

“This type of fossil preparation is a collaborative science,” said Jett. “There are basically two sciences that lend them well to non-academics: astronomy and paleontology.

“If someone comes to me looking for a job and all they can do is recite a bunch of dinosaur facts, that’s not going to get me excited about hiring them. Much of what we do requires infinite patience, attention to detail and a strong skill set in problem solving. I can teach anyone about dinosaurs.”

The current Triebold fossil preparation project on display through the window of the museum is a Tylosaurus. This extinct lizard lived during the same time period as the dinosaurs and is close in taxonomy to the modern-day monitor.

“Imagine a 30-foot Komodo Dragon that lived in the ocean and ate sharks,” said Jett.