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Need help making sense of an urchin


MrBones

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I recently found a bunch of eocene urchins near Jebel Hafeet in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates. 

Most of them are a peculiar orange colour. The trouble comes when trying to expose the hidden parts of the urchin. When I remove the matrix, I don't see the orange color anymore. There's a grey layer that covers the fossil, which looks exactly like the fossil, but it's on top of the fossil. The matrix pops off of this layer. I don't know how to prepare this. Many of the urchins are only about as thick as a folded piece of paper, so I don't want to mess around too much with vinegar.

 

Any tips?

 

20211004_152053.thumb.jpg.d8509357eda543c5fa831a94957b592b.jpg

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What do you mean by the hidden parts? The picture shows a portion of the "shell" of the urchin, also called a test. They are relatively thin and my experience is that the soft internal structures don't usually fossilize. Typically, I would look up what types of urchins are found at your locality, determine what the likely shape is, then try to visualize it with what you have. Using the mental image, I would then chase the surface of the test laterally to see if I have a complete test. Its hard to tell 3 dimensional features from your fossil. From the single picture, it looks like an incomplete test and there isn't much more to expose. I'm not sure going deeper gets you anything.  

  • I Agree 1
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