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Hello everyone, I recently acquired a monstrously huge Mosasaurus beaugei skull which I would like to display in my house The skull measures 170 cm / 67" and weights 85 kg /187 lbs Does anyone have similar fossils which they mounted on their walls, or displayed in their cabinets? Thank you.

Thought I would share some simple, inexpensive display stands I made for some of my smaller fossils. I don't suggest these are museum quality, but hopefully this will encourage others to experiment. These fossils were in my display case but just lying on the floor of a shelf. I didn't feel this was an optimum way to display them. I wanted to get them up off the floor, but I didn't want to spend a lot of money. So I decided to go with a simple wooden base together with some brass rod I bent to shape. The wood came from a 1x3" piece of red oak, 2 feet long, that I got at the local Osh hardware store for $4.49. I sawed some pieces off of it the correct length and have plenty left over for future use. For the brass, I bought some 1/16" rod (4 pieces, 12" long each, for $2.99) and some 3/32 brass tubing (3 pieces, 12" long each for $3.49), also from Osh. I figured out what lengths I needed and cut them with a jeweler's saw. There is plenty left over for more stands. The tubing serves as the straight vertical piece, and the rod (which fits neatly inside the tubing) is bent to shape to hold the fossil. I don't try to get a tight fit around the fossil, I want to be able to easily remove the fossil whenever I want. After I got everything the way I wanted it, I soldered the brass together using 95:5 tin-silver solder (it is fairly strong for a soft solder). Unfortunately the color of the solder doesn't match the brass, but it's behind the fossil out of view so I wasn't too worried. For the wood stand, I rounded the corners of the wood and sanded it smooth, then figured out where I wanted the vertical rods and drilled 3/32 diameter holes at those locations. I then stained the wood with some leftover stain from another project. After it dried, I sprayed on two coats of clear gloss polyurethane. After everything was dry, I inserted the rods into the holes and used some 5-minute epoxy on the underside to hold them in place (there is a shallow clearance hole drilled on the underside of the hole for the epoxy). The labels are just something I put together from PowerPoint and printed on ordinary paper using a color laser printer. I protected the front of the label with ordinary scotch tape and used spray adhesive on the back to apply it to the wood. The one thing I'm not sure about is whether I should dip the ends of the brass rod where they touch the fossil in some liquid plastic something like black Plasti-Dip. I'm worried the brass might scratch the fossil where it touches, but I'm not sure whether a plastic covering would be archival quality. Any advice would be welcome. Hope this inspires you to try your own designs.

Hello TFF members - I'm in need so some advice on this one please. So this is my first post (happy to be corrected on any newbie errors) and although preparation is my favourite part of the fossil game, I am 'fairly' new to it - In other words, please go easy on me, I'm aware it's going to be all too tempting to say I've bitten off more than I can chew here... I recently purchased this Mosasaur skull from a well known European fossil auction site; you may have seen it yourself if you follow such things. It wasn't 'hugely' expensive, but that doesn't mean I'm not serious about making something good out of it and giving it a lot of attention (which clearly it will need...). It is from Morocco, was sold as a Platycarpus (from the teeth I would tend to agree, but please correct if you think otherwise) and originally was complete in a plaster jacket. The seller decided to prep it and remove from the jacket. Whilst this may have exposed more of it, some quite nicely, they have also turned it into the most insanely fragile fossil I have ever come into contact with! It was already in five large pieces when advertised for sale, and despite being very well packaged, has suffered further in transit. The matrix is not much more than hard (ish) sand and the bone only marginally more solid. Doesn't help that it's so crushed, so only matrix between each piece. Clearly leaving it in the matrix, perhaps replacing the jacket with something more aesthetically pleasing as part of a mount and prepping only the surface would have been the way to go, but it's beyond that now, so I would really love some thoughts and suggestions on the following: 1 - Immediate stabilisation and strengthening to prevent further breakages and reattach the broken sections (buckets of CA to solidify the sand matrix and reduce porosity to enable gluing?) 2 - Rebuilding/mounting (combining these two, as it will never be strong enough to hold in one piece and the mounting technique will likely need to be integral as it will need complete support across the entire back. It would never be my first choice, but I'm thinking a rebuilt matrix under the fossil to support and hold it together at the same time?) Ok, lots of text there for background and to give you more context, here are some pictures which will help... Original, in jacket: Advert pics: And another: Now it's home, in a slightly more confused state: And another: Last one, you get the idea: If anyone is interested in seeing more of it, please let me know, have lots of pics. It's an interesting item and despite being crushed to hell, looks to be fairly complete (the reverse tells it's own story too, more teeth there, etc.), but it's realistically only ever going to be an 'in matrix' display piece. Out of curiosity, I believe it's upside down, with the two maxilla visible on top and the upper jaw section being below, sure someone will easily be able to confirm? Anyway, enough from me, would love your thoughts and really appreciate anyone who has the time to consider and reply. If I haven't been clear or you need more info, please just let me know. Thank you, Dave

Can I get some tips on how to mount a fossil? What materials do I need and is there a thread that someone has already made on the forum that I can follow and learn? Thanks!

We are back home now after being evacuated for a week because of the wildfires around Santa Rosa. Before we were evacuated I had started working on a Christmas gift for a friend who likes my fossils but is not a dedicated collector. In searching through my collection, I found a Knightia eocaena fossil fish I had dug from the Split Fish Layer near Kemmerer, Wyoming. It’s not the greatest specimen, but since I had both the part and counterpart I thought it might be interesting to put them together into a single frame. I thought I would fill you in on what I did. Original fish slabs The first thing was to cut both slabs into identically-sized rectangles using an old tile saw I once picked up from Harbor Freight. The next step was to figure out how I wanted to frame them. To do the design, I used PowerPoint to create various size rectangles into which I pasted JPEGs of the fossils. After a bit of experimentation, I came up with this design I liked. PowerPoint design of framed fish Since the design didn’t fit within a standard commercial frame, I needed to construct my own. I started with ¾” pine corner molding I picked up at the local Home Depot for $0.78 per foot. I bought 8 feet worth so I had plenty of extra in case I made a mistake. I used a small miter box to cut the 45-degree angles on the frame pieces. While the cuts were pretty good, I knew they wouldn’t be perfect. So I made each piece slightly longer than necessary and used the disk sander on my Harbor Freight belt sander to sand the edges flat at the correct length. I used a 45-degree triangle to set the guide so I got a perfect 45-degree angle on the sander. Next, I glued the frame together using wood glue. I picked up two corner clamps from Harbor Freight (notice a trend here…) so I could glue two sides together at a time. Once the glue dried I removed the clamps and used them again to glue the two halves together into the final frame. To paint the frame, I used a can of spray paint in my custom-designed spray painting booth. Custom designed paint booth built from materials in my garage. Note it is obvious I live in wine country. I considered several options for how to mount the fossils in the frame. I finally decided to cut a piece of ½” plywood so that it just fit inside the frame. Then I used my Harbor Freight scroll saw to cut out two rectangles just the right size for the fish. I glued the fish into the plywood using Duco cement along the edges, making sure the fronts of the fish slabs were flush with the front of the plywood. The next step was to cut a window mat out of mounting board that would fit between the plywood and the frame to give it a finished appearance. To get the desired orange color I took ordinary white mat board and glued a sheet of colored artist’s paper onto it. I have a Logan Compact Mat Cutter that I use to cut mats when mounting my photographs. It wasn’t designed to cut such small mats but with a little creativity I was able to make it work. You can see all the lines I drew on the back of the board showing where to make the cuts. I also cut a piece of 1/32” clear acrylic to fit between the mat and the frame for protection. The fossil slabs were too thick for the frame and I needed to thin them down. So it was back to the Harbor Freight belt sander. Although I had never tried this before, I figured the matrix was soft enough that the 80-grit sandpaper would make short work of it, and besides, the sanding belt would be inexpensive to replace if necessary. As predicted, it worked fine. Finally, I cut a piece of ¼” red oak I had laying around to serve as the back, painted it the same color as the frame, added a sawtooth picture hanger, glued a laser-printed label on the plywood, and screwed it all together. Here is the final result: It was such a fun project I decided to take the same approach to construct a homemade version of a Riker mount:

The shop got an upgrade this week. Mount making just got easier with a new 2 burner propane forge. This will allow me to shape steel for mounts and stands much more efficiently than the old coal forge I was using. I can also modify/make specialty digging tools now! The options are limitless...