Gallery
These photos are from my Instagram feed and get updated every week.
The billfish skull is back and not radioactive anymore after being neutron scanned at @ansto, thanks @dr_joseph_bevitt for all your efforts!
A huge thanks to everyone that visited the fossil workshop today, it was great meeting so many fossil enthusiasts! The kids prep area was super busy 😀
This Sat 25 May and Sun 26 May. Come and check out some of my fossil collection, there's a kids area for digging as well. I will have the turtle skull, massive crab, penguin, plesiosaur bones and many other fossils on display. It's in Waikuku, about 30 min north of Christchurch at the Old School Collective. There's a great cafe as well if you fancy a coffee.
I just got back from an amazing 6 day field trip into the hills near Culverden for Geo240. We mapped the area, made cross sections, found faults, found mice, and hit many, many rocks with our shiny new rockhammers. I learned so much in such a short time and met some really great people.
I've started setting up my fossil workshop and display area! It's a beautiful old school building at The Old School collective in Waikuku.
I had a great time talking about fossils at Te Papa tonight, thanks to everyone who came out to listen! A huge thanks to the team at Te Papa for organising everything and to the sign language people for doing an amazing job.
I'll be talking fossils this coming Thursday at 06 30pm, Level 4 Te Papa. I'll be bringing a number of fossils along including the turtle skull, giant crab and much more!
Such beautiful patterns in this bit of Cretaceous bone I found today.
Some beautiful fossil coconuts from Nortland in New Zealand, they are roughly 15 million years old. They are Cocos zeylandica and show New Zealand used to be quite a bit warmer. I visited a fellow fossil hunter and she kindly gave me these, I'll have to go find some myself one day The scientific info is from the GNS website
Yesterday, I braved the rain to go have a quick look for some fossils and found a large concretion that had just fallen out the cliff. It has some bone sticking out, which looks like the beak of a bony toothed bird (pelagornithid)!!
I was blown away by this 85% complete Triceratops in the Melbourne museum, the bones are HUGE! Imagine how long that took to prep 😆 I had great fun at CAVEPS 2023, so many great talks by very passionate paleontologists
My fossil shark poster arrived today! Thanks @cofcnaturalhistory 😀
Here are some frames I took from a video of the scan of some cetacean teeth I found in a concretion. It was scanned by a beam of neutrons at ANSTO as traditional x-rays aren't powerful enough to penetrate this dense rock from what I understand. Keep an eye on my YouTube channel for the full video, it's pretty mind-blowing footage! This is going to help me prep the concretion as I now have a map of where the teeth and bones are in the rock.
I'm doing a 3d scan of that 48 million year old fossil marlin skull tonight with my POP2. A friend from up north, Stuart, sent me this mega carousel which is great for a 15kg skull 😃
I'm excited to try and prep these ammonites! Thanks so much @yorkshire_fossil_hunter 😀 Keep an eye out for a future prep video.
An amazing piece of petrified wood I found in a stream today. I thought it was a modern piece of wood till I picked it up and felt how heavy it was!
The left side of the penguin is coming along nicely, it's very symmetrical!
Some petrified wood I found today in North Canterbury, all very different looking.
The cutest tiny fossil crab I found today!
Here's a throwback to my first ever set of whale ear bones I found that one of the team at @te_papa kindly labelled. I donated it to Te Papa before I was into 3D scanning so I might have to go and scan it one day so I can print a copy for myself.