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Hi folks- I have had a good time this past month after work, prepping some White River specimens. This first one is the smallest turtle I have ever found... it so cute! This one took me 8 hours to prep. This next one is now officialy one of the prides of my colletcion. Whe I collected it only the top of the skull and a few leg bones were visible. No field shot, but here it is before prep began. You can see the skull at the bottom of the block, and some leg bones just above my thumb and a few more to the left of the green and black marks. I took this to the CT scanner in my local hospital and had a look inside. Here is one slice out of many that the machine took. (Each slice is 3mm thick, so any bone smaller than that might not show up) You can see the skull and teeth. The white oval at the bottom of the skull is the ear opening. Onthe CT scan, you can clearly see the leg that is visible above my thumb in the above photo. To the right of the skull the slice goes through the front leg. These were really exciting to find at the hospital. My friend the CT technician gives me a CD when I leave with three files of slices, one in each of the x,y and z planes. It is often easy enough to read and figure out what is in there. At the hospital and on the CD, we can scroll through all the slices and make a movie out of it. I could not figure out how to export that. (It is likely not possible as these CT programs are all proprietary). After I left, my buddy created a 3d rendering of this fellow. This also comes on a CD and I can flow through it like a movie. I can also take screen shots and make stereophotos from them by taking two consecutive frames and glueing them together. That's what this next photo is. The vertical is a bit exaggerated because each frame is a bit too far apart from its neighbors to make a perfect stereo image. If you know how to see stereophotos, enjoy. This photo is an excellent guide to prepping. You can see that some areas have excessive red stuff. These are areas where the rock has more calcite in it and does not CT scan as well, so the machine can't tell me exactly what is going on there. And here are a few pix of the final product. Hypisodus is a small (really small) artiodactyl; a distant relative to modern deer. Not an ancestor, but an offshoot on the family tree. It had a big eye and huge ear bones suggesting that it was nocturnal. Unlike any modern artiodactyl, it has five toes on the front leg and four on the rear. The back leg is condiserably longer than the front. The font leg on this one is to the left of the lower jaw. You can only see three toes; the other two are too deep in the rock to expose. The second front leg is actually exposed on the other side, under the skull. The back legs are the one folded up by the snout and the other one at the bottom of the rock. Below is a closer view of that back leg. At the tip, you can clearly see two large-ish hoofs. They are the ends of two functional toes. Each functional toe includes that hoof, then two toe bones, then a much much longer metatarsal (the second functional toe is hidden more or less parallel to the one you can clearly see). Then there are two non-functional toes that probably had dew claws. You can see the long very thin metetarsal of one of thoes toes here as well as the first toe bone attached to it. This metatarsal is too thin to show up on the CT scan. Hospital CT scanners have their limits. This thing took me 35 hours to prep. It was all done under the microscope with a number three MicroJack, and dolomite in the air abrasive machine used at 5 to 20 psi, for those taking notes.