Gallery
These photos are from my Instagram feed and get updated every week.
Prep update on that sawshark rostrum I am prepping, it's progressing well and showing good preservation!
I met Roland on the beach today, a while later he called me over to show me a piece of bone he found. I was pretty sure it was a whale ear bone. He kindly let me take it home so I can prep it.
My only fossil I found during a 4 hour hunt, a tiny crab carapace. Looks to be a Trichopeltarion greggi missing it's legs and claws.
This whale ear bone (bulla) is prepping really nicely. One of the tubes even connects through to the other side. It's way more intricate than I thought! It probably has another week to go.
It's time for my favourite game... fish, bird, or neither! I found this Miocene concretion today with a row of boney looking things sticking out, and a bonus little rostral tooth. Let me know what you think!
I am blown away by this package I got from a viewer, a 3D printed crab, polished shell, painted scene and a variety of other fossil shells in a handmade wooden tray!!! Thanks so much Stuart, Di, and Caroline. You went to such a huge amount of effort to put this together, I've been smiling all day!! I've always wanted to be able to share my fossils with everyone and seeing how realistic this fossil crab replica is, it's totally possible!!! The painted scene is on the back of a conglomerate of fossil shells as well!!
I'm wondering if this triangular hole could be some feeding damage? It's on a Miocene vertebra block I just finished prepping.
Not much left to prep in this whale ear bone!
A good Friday night's work 🐳🐬🐟🐧 prepped and coated for the next round of acid prep.
I've got a bit of a mystery fossil here and hoping someone recognizes it 🤞 It's a Miocene fossil from New Zealand on a siltstone concretion.
I found this mystery fossil, I'm thinking fish 🤔 does anyone have a better ID on it? Unsure of the age of the area but probably Miocene and definitely a ocean deposit.
I think I might have found another Norfolk Pine leaf at this mid-Miocene, mid-shelf siltstone deposit. It's very similar to my previous one. Quite amazing that something so delicate can leaf a fossil and survive being tumbled along the beach.
Great detail on this crab claw that saw the light tonight. It's from a large Tumidocarcinus giganteus crab 🦀
I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole and tried to create a machine learning model to automatically ID thr species. It's actually working quite well with it correctly getting them about 60% of the time so far 😀 if you know of a nice image dataset that I can use to train it some more, please let me know!
A find from my latest video, a huuuuge block of what I'm guessing is some fossil whale bones. It looks like the cross section through some big ribs! If only it wasn't 5km from the nearest road and didn't weigh a few tons. I couldn't see anything skull looking in it so maybe nothing very diagnostic in there 🤔 Check my bio out for the link to my YouTube channel if you want to check the video out.
I finally got some merch sorted out, just in time for my 50k YouTube subscriber giveaway! Head over to www.mamlambofossils.com and click on the SHOP link.
A bit of petrified wood I found recently with some nice growth rings showing. I polished it using some pads I attached to my drill press. I'm just about done with the video in which I find this bit, it should be up tomorrow 😃 Also, a random agate I found on the same day. Maybe a glacial erratic 🤔
I had a few questions around where the cervical vertebrae would be from in the plesiosaurus bone block I had just prepped. They would have been pretty close to the skull and are missing the neural arches. I wonder if the other half of the concretion had the skull in 😀
I've just finished prepping this juvenile plesiosaur bone cluster with nine separate bones in it. It took about three weeks of work which was about a week of manual prep and two weeks of acid prep. It was a very tricky prep as the rock was full of cracks which the acid kept getting into and there was a trace fossil on the back I wanted to keep. Its from the aristonectinae family of elasmosaurs and probably the third or fourth example from New Zealand. Full prep video is on my YouTube channel, link in my bio.
Im trying a new method to get some microfossils ready for a closer inspection. It was a real pain to get hold of some hydrogen peroxide as there seems to be a shortage of it at the moment. The peroxide is hopefully going to remove the bit of calcite and siltstone still covering the forams. I'll do a video of the process for anyone interested in the process. Swipe to see an example of one of the forams, its about 1mm long.