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Showing results for tags 'belacartwrightia'.
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Well I was fortunate to have the opportunity to collect with my fossil friend DevonianDigger and two others last week at Penn Dixie for a few hours. We probably moved about a ton of rock and who knows how much overburden. Jay was kind enough to share what he thought might be a promising spot even though he could only stay with us till noon. We pretty much had the site to ourselves so I was able to use the saw which helped us a lot in freeing out large blocks from the trilobite bearing layer. We got quite muddy as the water level at the site was fairly high. We in fact spent some time creating a drainage ditch to clear out the water from where we were digging. Between us we probably took out 60 potentially complete eldredgeops and perhaps 4 or 5 greenops and this little guy that I started to prep this morning. I knew this one had damage as the bug was in both the positive and the negative of the split. I was pretty sure in the field that it was not a greenops. I also have two presumed greenops I also found that are currently in glue up waiting prep. The prep starts out by reuniting the top and the bottom halves of the bug with cyanoacrylate glue that is clamped for 24 hours. Resist the urge to prep right away the glue bonds better if you let it cure 24 hours. Here is the first picture that I took just as the top of the eye is becoming exposed. Notice how I cut out the top piece and joined it to the bottom piece. You want to leave as little matrix on the top section as you can get away with because you do have to take it all of during the prep process. Here we are a little bit further. There is minimal scribe work being done it is all being done with 40 micron dolomite and a .015 COMCO nozzle on a COMCO MB1000 air abrasion unit at about 30 PSI. If I were to do much if any scribe work I would risk vibrating the glue bond loose and it would never glue back properly a 2nd time. Your first attempt at a join is always the best. Unfortunately I can already tell that there is some skin missing on the cephalon and that one of the genal spines is not there. After a bit more work So is it a greenops or a belacartwrightia More to come as the prep continues not counting gluing time we have about an hour invested in this bug. It is not a flawless bug by any means but is likely to be my first confirmed bela from Penn Dixie... I have prepped a couple of Bela's from there including a Fossil of the month here on the Forum ... but alas they were not mine......
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