Although it is fossil season, I've not managed to get out much lately beyond some rummaging in the Hungry Hollow Member. Instead, I've been busy with prep and drawing. I'm not quite ready to show the prep just as yet, but I've got some new trilo-doodles. Next trip will likely be Bowmanville in June.
Now that my replacement stylus has arrived, it's back to the lab. I've got a bit of a backlog of pieces to prep, so I could have worse problems! I prepare my fair share of these bugs, but this one will present some opportunities to try out some new preparation approaches. This is how I found it in its field fresh state at Penn Dixie. I bucketed it on account of seeing the full roller. Another WIP is photobombing this one at the top, but after some exploratory scribing, I encountered two more rollers. Sadly, my scribe blasted off a piece of the middle one, but I can do some restoration with Milliput once I'm done. My goal here is not to be as trilobitocentric, but to prep the brachiopod at the top, and the rugose coral below to make it an association piece emblematic of PD fauna. Who needs acres of bulk matrix? My ME-9100 sails through the stuff. The leftmost bug is pretty much fine as it stands without more bulk matrix removal, so it just needs a good blasting. I'll work to expose the middle bug's cephalon, but have to be careful not to overexpose its pygidium and thorax given its close proximity to the brach and the other bug. Still, I can do some very precise work with the Aro to create a kind of "channel" between them. The rightmost bug has its cephalon matrix-down, so I'll prep this one with its back showing. Just to give a sense of the levels I'm working, this perspective shows it is not just like a flat slab. I've been carefully exposing more of the bugs as well as the coral and brach. Once that is done, matrix prep, blasting, and final touches. I'll update this as I go. Stay tuned...
Having just finished teaching a week-long course, and with no work currently penciled in the schedule until late June (although that could change), I can dedicate some serious time to fossils. This means collecting, prepping, and drawing. CollectingI'll be prospecting some new possible sites. Once a site has been picked over, tapped out, or shuttered, it's time to do the work of exploration and field survey. That means extending the search and testing the layers (or the heavy work of exposing them). Once that is done, an assessment is made as to the site's productive life-span: is it something that will last several seasons, or something an individual can clear out in a few trips? Apart from that, I got word that we are a go for a June engagement at one of the last quarries that still lets collectors in, so I'll have that to look forward to. PreparationIt's also time to get some prep done. First up is this 80 mm asaphid, but there are a bundle of Penn Dixie bugs to work on as well. This is where it stands after about six hours. Apart from some sticky calcite on the right cheek, this has been a delight to work on, but having the ME-9100 makes matrix removal much easier. In fact, since I'm waiting for a replacement stylus for my Aro scribe, I did all of this with the ME-9100, and it is great that I can dial down the BPM when I get close to the shell. There's still some work to do, such as removing matrix between a few segments and the base matrix smoothing, but I'm awaiting some scalpels in the mail to do the inter-segment and touch-up work. As an expert Russian preparator told me, never use abrasion: it burns and lightens the skin no matter what medium or PSI; it must be done by hand. That was my error on the last Asaphus lepidurus I prepped. DrawingI was far too busy and tired this week to put pencil to paper, but I have two WIPs, a few sketched concepts, and Deb bought me some black paper so that I can try out drawing white pencil on black background. At this point, I'm pretty much looking at a 20 hour backlog of bugs to doodle. Update: Managed to get three since Friday. The last bit is some tidying up of the trilobite catalogue. I recently acquired this piece, which is a Cambrian Hamatolenus sp. from Morocco.
This post is more a stub, and I'll update it when I've rolled up my sleeves for some of the stuff I mentioned above. In the last month I made an investment in a new camera. Previously, all my pictures have been using my iPad. The iPad is not an awful photo-taking device, but it does have its limitations when taking macros, and any of the add-on apps like Camera+ only make a small difference in quality. There are very small trilobites or details thereof that could really use a more effective camera.
And so I am now the proud owner of an Olympus TG-5. I won't list all the neat features as that can easily be Googled, but it also very conveniently doubles as a great and rugged field camera. The other feature, relevant to fossils, is its micro/macro functionality. The micro has an in-built photo-stacking feature to resolve issues of depth of field (the closer one zooms on an object, the more radial blur occurs -- something stacking fixes). When I take a very close-up image using the stacking, the camera takes multiple shots at slightly different angles and depths, and flattens the crispest aspects into one image. So I took it out for a bit of a trial run on some trilobites: Nice, crisp closeups. Just to give a sense of scale, the agnostids in the second picture are only a few millimetres long. Next are two images of the same trilobite (Eldredgeops rana) at different zoom levels: Overall, much better than using the iPad. The camera was not cheap, but I'm quite pleased that it will be able to serve a useful function for more than just once a year when I'm in Jamaica.
Recently returned from a three-day dig in New York. Despite all the lovely weather leading up to the trip, an almost wintry weather system was working its way through this part of the world with a lot of cold and precipitation. Not exactly pleasant collecting conditions! Day 1: Penn DixieThe excavator had been busy the days leading up to our visit. 160 fresh new piles of Windom shale were dug up and off limits until the annual Dig with the Experts event in May. The excavator did dig up one promising area. One of my field comrades had already visited the day before to start a bench and was finding some good material. Friday was brutal. We only managed to stay out for three hours given the pouring rain, sleet, and the lake wind. In fact, it was so cold and wet that I didn't really take any site or collector pics. Despite digging for only three hours, we still managed to find examples of just about every trilobite species reported at the site, missing only Pseudochenella. The two above are Bellacartwrightia sp., Eldredgeops rana, and the bottom two are Greenops barberi and Dipleura dekayi. The Dipleura is exceedingly rare at Penn Dixie, and was found in the Bayview bed. Day 2: Deep Springs RoadNow an annual tradition, Fossil Forum members congregate at a spot in central New York, a shale outcrop on Deep Springs Road. It was snowing for a bit. Deb sat this one out, but went to Penn Dixie later in the day to find some trilobites. As I had already hoovered up most of the usual fauna from this site last year with representatives of most of the brachs and bivalves, my sole goal was to find a complete Dipleura dekayi. Sadly, my efforts were for naught after six hours of slabbing and splitting. Most other stuff I found I gave away to other collectors there. I did find these two phyllocarid carapaces (Rhinocaris columbina) that I gifted to my good friend Tim who had also found an amazing phyllocarid telson. I didn't do so well on the trilobite front. It was mostly partials for me. One of the other traditions of this meet-up is that we exchange fossil gifts. Pictured above on the left is a chunk of dinosaur jaw from Tony that could be Triceratops or Edmontosaurus. Top right are two Elrathia kingii from James who just came back from Utah, as well as some belemnites and a gastropod from Jeffrey's giveaway box. For my part I offloaded two bins of fossils to Tony for his museum. At the bottom is a fantastic gift from Tim: a Dipleura dekayi hypostome (very uncommon!) and Piochaspis sellata from the Pioche shales of Nevada. To my good friend Tim who is a fish fossil fan, my only non-trilobite drawing. Knightia eocaena. Day 3: Penn Dixie AgainInitially, Jay and I had plans to collect a few hours in Dunkirk where it is rumoured that Dunkleosteus pieces could be found, and a generous offer to go through some Linton coal in search of Pennsylvanian aged fish and amphibians. Things didn't work out that way, and I was kind of itching to find more trilobites at the first spot we were working on the Friday. This time, the dig was not curtailed by weather: it finally got warm and sunny. I spent 12 hours hammering and slabbing. This is the only site pic I took, and this is a "before" image at 7 am. The chunks of rock in the foreground need to be broken down, and the area around my bucket and pry bar is the bench. By 7 pm, all of that area was cleared out. As the day progressed, the trilobites were thinning out. I made my last significant find around 3 pm, after which it was mostly coral/brach assemblages in very tough, trashy matrix that would shatter rather than split. Not much to write home about. This is actually a small haul compared to my usual 50-100 bugs per trip, but the pulse was pinching out and the site's excavated areas may not be ideal for trilobites this year. Still, some interesting pieces to prep. And speaking of which, I've already thrown one into the lab to give my new tools something gainful to do. The initial field state was only showing the thorax. I used the ME-9100 to remove a lot of the excess rock, the Aro for detailing around the bug, the Paasche for abrasion, and decided to pedestal this. Matrix work was mostly filing and sanding. This kind of matrix preparation is not everyone's cup of tea, but these are common bugs and I wanted to play around with some presentation experiments.
And that's it. Not sure where/when the next trip will be given the sad shrinking of viable or accessible sites in Ontario. But I'll find a way... |
Kane Faucher
Archives
February 2024
|