"It's like opening Christmas presents," says San Diego Natural History Museum Fossil Lab Preparation Manager Maggie Carrino of her job.

"Sometimes you get socks. Sometimes you get a pony. And sometimes you

Fossil Lab Preparation Manager Maggie Carrino

get...a mammoth!"

The present Carrino opened was the plaster jacket containing the skull of a mammoth unearthed during construction of Thomas Jefferson's Downtown campus in February.

The discovery was world-wide news. But have you wondered what has been happening with the mammoth remains since they were encased in plaster and removed from the site?

The 200-thousand-year-old-plus fossils have been at the museum's warehouse to be prepared for research and possible display.

"Expose, stabilize and preserve," is the mission of Team Paleo, the three-person group Carrino leads. And it's a - well -- mammoth task. So far Carrino, along with Richard Cerutti and Jennifer Nash, have spent more than 185 hours working with the skull.

Jennifer Nash

It is painstaking, exacting work, done with an array of tools, some of which you might find in your dentists' office. There are dental picks, toothbrushes, an air scribe which looks -- and sounds -- exactly like your dentists' drill. Plus X-Acto knives and a variety of small brushes. They are using a kind of paleontological Krazy Glue called Butvar, which gets absorbed into the fossilized bones and hardens over time to stabilize the structure.

"It's exciting, because you are the first person to ever see it," Carrino says of the feeling you get when you start to remove the matrix and see the underlying fossil.

The Mammoth's Molars Look Like "moon boots"

When you see the giant skull up close, it looks like the mammoth swallowed an astronaut, whose moon boots are the only thing left in its mouth. But the "boots" are actually the two top molars of the ancient mammoth - which the team exposed by slowly removing the ages-old matrix of dirt, sand and fossilized bones which encased the teeth.

The result is spectacular.

Not only can you see the two perfectly preserved molars, but you can see the bony tubes from which the mammoth's 10-foot tusks emerged.

The tusks are still in plaster casts, but other parts of the mammoth are at the museum, where the Museum's Chief  Paleontologist Tom Demere and his team are processing and cataloging them, along with parts of the ancient gray whale which was unearthed shortly after the mammoth was dug up.

Demere held up the a vertebra of the and peered through it - to show how large the whale must have been when it lived during the Pleistocene Age, around half-a-million years ago.

The two large mammals, the mammoth and the whale, have yet to give up all their secrets, but the museum's paleontologists feel that the fossils from the TJSL site are a highly significant find that will eventually add a lot to their knowledge of prehistoric San Diego County.

In the meantime, Maggie Carrino and her team have more than 170 hours of preparation left to do on the mammoth skull before they get to open their next "present."