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I recently got started sculpting digitally, and with this new hammer I am now excitedly looking for nails! My thoughts turned to some of my microfossils, specifically some of my really old shark teeth. Microfossils in general are difficult to appreciate without a microscope, so I figured it would be fun to sculpt a few. My first subject is a Devonian Phoebodont shark tooth that I thought looked neat enough. Besides being some of the oldest teeth I know of (380-390 Ma), they look very different from the teeth of modern sharks (except for those of the frilled shark). Most of the teeth are broken, but I luckily had enough fragments to get a good picture of what a complete tooth looked like. With these fossils as my reference I quickly squashed and shaped a chunk of virtual clay into a passable shark tooth: And thanks to the wonders of today's technology, I can actually share that model directly in an interactive manner: I didn't do so much work on the bottom since I intended to 3D print it. And after warming up the printer and waiting for 3 hours... I was able to do all this in an evening. I'm hoping to do more possibly throughout the Summer as my time and inspiration allow. There are a couple of other sharks I had in mind, but I'm open to crowd-sourcing suggestions/requests.

The silent dinosaur hypothesis. Mark P. Witten's Blog Yours, Paul H.

On finding a Megalichthys scale fossil from the Late Carboniferous in my local stream I designed, carved and printed a lino-block of the carnivorous freshwater fish. In the same slab of rock that the scale was found were Lepidodendron and Calamites fossils that would have been deposited at the bottom of the coal swamp. I would like to have thought of this fish hiding in the murky waters alongside these plants and I based my reconstruction on this. I plan to do a series of three including Rhizodopsis and Rhabdoderma, alongside their respective surrounding vegetation. Credit where credit is due the general proportions and pose of the fish are based on a reconstruction by ДиБгд as seen on Megalichthys' Wikipedia page.