There wasn"t a facility in India that could do the deep cleaning the fossil required. It took Wilson four years to get approval from Geological Survey of India (GSI), a government-run body that oversees geological surveys across the country, to transport the specimen to the US. When the time came, he packed it all into a box, and put it in a backpack which he carried with him back to the United States, he says. Once there, it took an entire year of cleaning to remove the rocky matrix around its soft and delicate bones.