Gallery
These photos are from my Instagram feed and get updated every week.
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.
I found this torpedo looking thing while out looking for fossils. Its used to take a fishing line out deep when fishing from the beach, and it's quite heavy as well! I managed to track the owners down and returned it later in the day.
Microfossil Monday! Some suspected forams I am working with at the moment. These are some mid-Miocene ones from New Zealand still in the siltstone. By the way, does anyone know where you can get those microfossil slides in New Zealand? The ones with the tiny compartments.
I'm just about done with the prep of the this Cretaceous bone I found a few months ago. I've removed so much rock and used a few different methods, let's see who can guess what type of bone 2as inside 😀
Such beautiful detail on this piece of Cretaceous bone I am working on! I'm hoping to have the video done in the next week, it's one of my more ambitious fossil preps thats for sure!
This bit of bone had a layer of what I suspect is calcite over the top of it making it really hard to see any detail. A vinegar bath made quick work of it though! Swipe to see the result.
Another mystery fossil from today. The white colour made me think gastropod but maybe it's something more interesting like a tooth. Let me know if you recognize it please 😀
I found this ~30kg bit of whale bone today. Is it a mandible or rostrum? Any ideas? It's really well preserved and might prep quite nicely 😀 Miocene around 8myo formation.
A cool crayfish tail sticking put of a concretion. There's nothing else showing so there should be a very complete crayfish inside there.
I found another section of what I suspect is part of a cetacean skull. I have another very similar concretion which had a section of squamosal and an earbone in it, hopefully this one does too! Some very dense bone in there for sure. I'm not sure if that is a bit of earbone peeking out in the one photo. I'll have to go back as there are 3 other pieces of it as well 😆