Caitlin Wylie’s “Preparing Dinosaurs: the work behind the scenes” (MIT Press 2021) provides a rich ethnographic analysis of the work of fossil preparators. On her account, knowledge in vertebrate paleontology is mediated through a three-way division of labour between paleontologists, preparators and volunteers, each with their own role, expertise and responsibility. In this review, I develop her notion of ‘preparation as knowledge’, focusing in particular on the nature of objectivity in paleontological knowledge and on the middle-road she indicates between constructivist (...) and realist approaches to epistemology. (shrink)