Eudora ? Bob Sieber and Lloyd Wisdom don’t know a thing about dinosaurs.

Yet there’s a 65 million-year-old triceratops skull suspended from an engine pull in Sieber’s garage.

A 65 million-year-old triceratops skull is under reconstruction in Eudora. From left, David Burnham, Matt Christopher, Jacqueline Kozisek, Lloyd Wisdom and Bob Sieber have been working to reassemble the skull in Sieber's garage in Eudora. The skull, which was found encased in rock in Montana, is being restored for a Massachusetts eye surgeon.

The massive, three-horned head arrived in fragments a little more than two months ago at Sieber’s Eudora home. By Thursday, he and Wisdom were just two bones shy of completely reconstructing it.

“You can’t go too many places in the world where they can do work like this,” David Burnham, a vertebrate paleontologist at Kansas University’s Natural History Museum, said Thursday as he inspected the custom steel structure supporting the prehistoric bones.

With Burnham’s knowledge of dinosaurs as their guide, Sieber and Wisdom both experienced steel workers have logged nearly 400 hours painstakingly piecing the bones together around a metal matrix they’ve formed and molded as they went along.

The finished product will end up in the home of a Massachusetts eye surgeon and dinosaur enthusiast who, along with his teenage daughter, uncovered the skull two years ago on a private ranch in Montana’s Hell Creek Formation.

Not your average wall-mountable deer head, the half-ton triceratops skull will occupy an addition to the doctor’s home one built especially for the Cretaceous plant-eater.

The price tag for the skull restoration?

¢ 6News video: Locals are assembling a triceratops skull in a garage

“That’s confidential,” Burnham said.

Whatever the price, it seems likely the East Coast doctor is getting his money’s worth.

The bulk of the skull arrived last Thanksgiving in a dozen large pieces. But hundreds of minute fragments had to be cleaned and pieced together as well.

“We’re talking some of them were only this big,” Sieber said, pointing to the tip of his pinky finger.

KU students Jacqueline Kozisek, a Chicago senior in biology, and Matt Christopher, an Olathe graduate student in vertebrate paleontology, devoted close to 1,000 hours using pneumatic chisels and tiny sandblasters to clean the bones before they were sent to Eudora.

“It can be nerve-wracking,” Kozisek said. “You’re like the first person to see the bone emerge, ever.”

Wisdom, who had never worked on a dinosaur project before this one, said he spent the first two weeks in a state of panic, afraid even to touch the 65 million-year-old bones, let alone grind them so steel would fit snugly against them. When he finally relaxed, he realized he had a challenging task on his hands.

“You had to hand-form everything,” said Wisdom, who lives in McLouth and works as a water plant operator in Tonganoxie. “It was all heat and hammers. And you had to work with what you had. There’s no blueprint for this thing.”

There are only two bolts in the entire skull. The rest is held together by a carefully engineered grid of steel supports that fit glovelike next to the contours of the bone and sometimes hook around the periphery of the skull. Soon, the team will mount it on a 250-pound steel stand before building a crate around it and trucking it to Massachusetts.

The triceratops skull is the fourth dinosaur project for Sieber, who works as a pipefitter in KU’s steam shop. The other three pieces are on display at the museum and KU’s Visitor Center. Despite the sometimes-tedious nature of the work, which eats up most of his evening free time, he said he would jump at the chance to do more of it.

“In a minute,” he said. “I love it.”