I haven't got out to collect anywhere nearly enough this season, and we're already cruising into summer. But I have been working steadily at the drawing table and the prep bench. I'm just about done all the more recent fossils in the preparation queue, with mostly tedious stuff left. Pictured above were some very awkward, crushed Penn Dixie Eldredgeops rana that I took on as a prep challenge. There wasn't much showing initially, but I knew they were complete despite their contorted orientation. This was a very delicate prep as crushed bugs like these are riddled with cracks, and it wouldn't take too much abrasion or even handling to pop off shell. They are very thin, but I'm proud of the effort I took to do these up properly. This is a closeup of a very wee bug (~1.7 cm). There's still some matrix in the segments to remove, but it is effectively complete. Given the number of rollers I have on hand, I can take a few more adventurous risks in preparation. I've done quite a few pedestaled rollers already, so in this case I wanted to cut as deeply as I could into the ventral side. In this one, I've exposed the cephalic doublure, and a portion of the hypostome (the rest is tucked under the impacted pygidium). Soon I hope to do a full dorsal-ventral prep. This is another wee bug (~1.7 cm) with problems that make it more a B-grader, and so ripe for a prep experiment. What is not shown in this top-down image is my attempt to pedestal this one -- a trickier proposition with a smaller prone. The two images above show the tiny bug's suspended/perched state. I could have been even more daring, but for a first try at cutting under a prone, I'm happy with it. I was able to spend the day mucking around in the Hungry Hollow Member. Lots of the usual stuff that I won't show here like gastropods (a very large Spinplatyceras), and acres of coral that just gets in the way of this turbid bed. My goal was to find complete examples of the trilobites Pseudodechenella and Crassiproetus. Fragments abound, but in this puree of a depositional environment full specimens are quite prized and rare. Obviously I did not succeed in finding a full one, but the cranidium of a Crassiproetus above is quite massive (~2 cm along the sagittal), which would have made the full one 6-9 cm in length. I cleaned this one up using baking soda abrasion. And relatively fresh from the sketching table, two relatively common but cherished Ordovician species. I am trying out a few new tricks on achieving some degree of photo-realism with pencils, and I think it is paying off.
My next post will likely be after the weekend biannual trip to Bowmanville as I hunt one of the few remaining locations for decent Ordovician material. Until then... Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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