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Show Us Your Sponges


JimB88

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That would do it.... Then I guess you have to compensate the exposure to not overexpose?

It looks like it's floating in midair.

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I have no links, but I can tell you how to do it:

All you need is digital camera, rotation table and a fossil! Decide how many shots you are going to use to create your animation. More shots - more smoothly will be animation (I use 36 shots). Then divide rotation table into equal sectors (in my case each sector = 10 deg.). Rotate your table from sector to sector and each time make a shot. In Photoshop create gif-animation. Upload it to TheFossilForum so we all can see animation you created ))))))

Thank you it sounds easier than it looks, I will give it a shot, or 36 to be more exact. :1-SlapHands_zpsbb015b76:

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That would do it.... Then I guess you have to compensate the exposure to not overexpose?

It looks like it's floating in midair.

I take shots with different power of built-in flash (full power, 1/2 power, 1/4 power...) to avoid highlights. My camera (Nikon D80) alows to change power of built-in flash.

You've got my idea - to show each sponge floating in midair with dark background! ))))

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  • 2 months later...
  • 1 month later...

Hexactinellida Sponge Fossil - Chenendopora(?) Bell County, Tx.

That's based on the similarity between my fossil and the one posted on this website:


http://www.fossilshe...porifera04.html


If what I am seeing on that website is accurate, this place seems to be a hexactinellida wonderland. Unfortunately few are as easy to identify as this one as they tend to be the amorphously shaped shallow water kind.

post-2324-0-20656600-1427702220_thumb.jpg
post-2324-0-81101300-1427702209_thumb.jpg
post-2324-0-71341300-1427702201_thumb.jpg
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Sorry... I'm going to have to create a zombie thread - four years of oblivion is too long! :muahaha:

 

So... I've got one or two sponges that I can share with you, I think. Most are no longer in my house, having ended up in museums, but still... I might as well share.

I'll start with Valospongia bufo, from the Tremadoc Afon Gam Biota of North Wales, together with a reconstruction.

Valospongia bufo recon.jpg

Valospongia bufo.jpg

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13 hours ago, Spongy Joe said:

Sorry... I'm going to have to create a zombie thread - four years of oblivion is too long! :muahaha:

 

So... I've got one or two sponges that I can share with you, I think. Most are no longer in my house, having ended up in museums, but still... I might as well share.

I'll start with Valospongia bufo, from the Tremadoc Afon Gam Biota of North Wales, together with a reconstruction.

Valospongia bufo recon.jpg

Valospongia bufo.jpg

That's a beauty! :)

I'm half Welsh, I think I forgot to mention, so have hunted North Wales a few times. 

Life's Good!

Tortoise Friend.

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Diolch yn fawr, TD! :)

 

Will try to get this thread properly reanimated, as a contribution to the aim of spongy world dominations... Come on folks, you must have picked up some good 'uns in the past few years?

 

Here's another: a micromorphic sponge from the Hetang Formation of Anhui Province. South China. It's early Cambrian (pre-trilobite), and perhaps the earliest articulated sponge known. The trick with this is to spot that tiny (5-mm) blobs are worth looking at, but you can clearly see the spicules under a microscope. Worse still, this was one of numerous similarly-sized sponges with different skeletons and body forms in the same beds...

   Sadly, not yet described and may not be for a good while (I no longer have easy access to the specimens). I dread to think how many similar unknown genera there are out there...

 

 

Hetang micromorphic.jpg

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Wonderful specimens, Joe! Anything pre-trilobite fascinates me. You don't see much from the Early Cambrian below trilobites. How did you acquire that one? Find it yourself? (PM me instead of giving the details publicly if you'd prefer not to)

I've probably got more Hormathiospongias that I've found since last post, I'll try to get some pics up soon.

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Hi Wrangellian. Yes, I picked that one up myself, while working with a different research group some years ago. It's not the main Hetang Biota site, but a different quarry in the same area.

 

The only other things that appear in those beds are algae (Chuaria-type blobs) and very rare Perspicaris carapaces. Must have been a lonesome world...

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Yes, those are (probably) the oldest articulated ones described. However... the Niutitang (as at Sansha) and Hetang formations are lateral equivalents, have quite an extensive thickness, and are difficult to correlate until the trilobites get going. Correlation is a bit difficult around the earliest Cambrian in China, though, because the microfossil flora isn't the most useful. As a result, it's not clear which sponges actually hold the record for the oldest articulated ones.

 

There are spicules going back further, though (right to the boundary), so there must be some extremely early articulated sponges to be found. Somewhere...

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5 hours ago, Spongy Joe said:

 

Will try to get this thread properly reanimated, as a contribution to the aim of spongy world dominations... Come on folks, you must have picked up some good 'uns in the past few years?

 

Thanks for the reanimation. Here's another one for you: Link

 

Greetings from the Lake of Constance. Roger

http://www.steinkern.de/

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Thanks, Jaimin... it's hard to know where to start, though I don't think of it as a collection, but more as work in progress. :)

 

Here's something different: isolated spicules of Polycornua  (no. 13: Pseudolancicula) from the Llandegley Rocks Lagerstatte in central Wales. It's not a well-known site, but includes a unique, shallow-water sandstone/conglomerate with sponges and echinoderms (among other things) preserved by extremely rapidly silicification. In some cases there's sponge soft tissue replaced by quartz, in 3D, which is a little bit mad.

     Occasionally, you find sponges where the soft tissues have decayed into a void, leaving broken spicules that have been sitting there since the Middle Ordovician, waiting to be picked out of the powder left behind. Even more occasionally, you get a small limestone concretion that you can dissolve to get the silica spicules out. Either way, this is what they look like.

 (taken from this 2005 paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2005.00470.x)

Pseudolancicula spics.png

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  • 3 weeks later...

OK, here's some more. I'm currently working on the latest Ordovician (post-extinction, last biozone of the Hirnantian) Anji Biota in China. This is a slab about 8 cm wide, with a selection of (probably three otr four) undescribed species on it. In total we have something over 100 species now, virtually all of them new. It's an utterly bonkers place, and I'm slowly working through some of the most important ones first...

 

cover2  tiny.jpg

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43 minutes ago, Spongy Joe said:

OK, here's some more. I'm currently working on the latest Ordovician (post-extinction, last biozone of the Hirnantian) Anji Biota in China. This is a slab about 8 cm wide, with a selection of (probably three otr four) undescribed species on it. In total we have something over 100 species now, virtually all of them new. It's an utterly bonkers place, and I'm slowly working through some of the most important ones first...

 

 

Very nice! :)

Sounds like a lot of work, but with all those new species very rewarding and exciting too. 

Life's Good!

Tortoise Friend.

MOTM.png.61350469b02f439fd4d5d77c2c69da85.png.a47e14d65deb3f8b242019b3a81d8160-1.png.60b8b8c07f6fa194511f8b7cfb7cc190.png

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