Environment & Energy

Museums with fossil vertebrate remains are now monitoring their back rooms for Rn, now that they realize how much U may accumulate in (phosphate-rich) fossil bones. Some fossils are even painted with lead paint, to block radiation (but not Rn, obviously).

This all started with a serendipitous observation by the late, great, husband-and-wife team, the Jaworowskis. He, a physicist, was trying to find the source of errors in a radiation detector by calibrating it to zero at home, away from the sources of radiation in his lab. She, a paleontologist, had some fossils on her desk which she was examining before preparing a published description. He found the background radiation levels at home higher than in his lab, and traced the source to her fossils. https://www.nature.com/articles/214161a0

I've read that some fossil hunters carry radiation detectors with them, since large bones may be associated with pockets of unusually high radiation. In at least one case, it worked (ceratopsian skull -- one of the most massive bones of any animal, ever).