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In the Blue Hill Shale Member of the Carlile Shale formation, you can sometimes find concretions that have very colorfully preserved ammonites. The concretions are usually about the size of a golf ball to baseball. They are smacked with a hammer to see if there is something inside, as many are empty. The concretions are extremely hard, but there is usually a weak spot between the ammonite and the super hard limestone. I recently picked up a CP air scribe, so I thought I'd try it out on a "mud ball" that had a little of a Scaphites carlilensis exposed. The outside of the concretion that is light gray is fairly soft. The dark gray interior is too hard to do much with. I found that if I worked on a part for a while with the scribe, a crack finally developed somewhere on the concretion. After working on the one in the lower part of the first photo, I found that it had another ammonite right next to it. This one was a Prionotropis hyatti. After a lot of work removing matrix, finding a couple tiny "extra ammonites" in the same ball, and gluing parts back together I finally arrived at the finished product. The camera does not do the color justice. The purpleish, pinkish, reddish, rainbows just don't show up well, but as you probably gathered from this long post, I'm kind of happy with the results!! Ramo