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Moroccan Verts


Ptychodus04

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@snolly50 was nice enough to send me a mess of a Moroccan concretion to play with recently. It started out as what appeared to be bits of vertebrae poking out of the block.

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After about 4 hours of scribing with my ME9100, I had uncovered a few scraps of bone but no centra were evident.

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The natural crack that you see opened up from the vibrations of the scribe and no robust bone was evident in the crack either. With John's permission, I began exploring the back of the block, hoping to find something worthy to prepare.

 

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Bingo, I found some bone. The crack happened to peel through a small section of the centra rather than through a full cross section giving the appearance of a lack of large bone in the concretion. 4 or 5 hours later and the verts were mostly exposed. Unfortunately, this concredtion had a thin layer of softer rock on the outside and a significantly harder inner core. The matrix is MUCH harder than the bone and I fought the bones trying to crumble the entire time. This has copious amounts of Vinac on the bones to stabilize them.

 

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At this point, the ME9100 is almost making no progress on matrix removal. Enter the Super Jack scribe. This beast will plow through the matrix. It ultimately saved me around 12 hours of scribe work on this project. The one thing you have to be careful of is the increased vibrations to the block with the more powerful scribe. I spent more time consolidating and aggressively applied Vinac to any bone as it was exposed. Prep progressed quickly with me alternating between the Super Jack for bulk matrix removal and the ME9100 for close to the bone work.

 

Including the exploratory time, I have 16 hours into this prep at the finish. I left some of the tool marks on the matrix rather than completely smoothing it out because I think it highlights the rugged nature of the piece and most Moroccan stuff has tool marks. The ones I have seen that are totally clean look off to my eye. It would be like @RJB leaving tool marks on his crab concretions. None of them have it so if they were there, it would look wrong. Here's the final product.

 

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Wow, that looks great!  You made “something out of nothing.”  That Super Jack sounds like a beast!  We’ve got a bridge here in the Bay Area that has been dropping blocks of concrete onto the cars below.  Maybe you cold come by and remove the offending material in your spare time. 

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Very nice, Kris.

 

One of these days I need to find the time (and some fossils) to develop some prepping skills.

 

Something for my fossil bucket list. ;)

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

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Great work, it looks amazing and I agree with the tool marks. It wouldn't look as good if it was smooth around the bones in my opinion. Do you know from what are these vertebrae? Did you identify it yet? Man I must get myself piece like that again soon, miss it since I finished my Otodus vertebrae.

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10 minutes ago, Sagebrush Steve said:

Wow, that looks great!  You made “something out of nothing.”  That Super Jack sounds like a beast!  We’ve got a bridge here in the Bay Area that has been dropping blocks of concrete onto the cars below.  Maybe you cold come by and remove the offending material in your spare time. 

I would wind up removing the offending bridge. You know I'm always on the lookout for scrap metal!

 

4 minutes ago, rebu said:

Great work, it looks amazing and I agree with the tool marks. It wouldn't look as good if it was smooth around the bones in my opinion. Do you know from what are these vertebrae? Did you identify it yet? Man I must get myself piece like that again soon, miss it since I finished my Otodus vertebrae.

They are plesiosaur vertebrae according to the more than famous (infamous) @snolly50. I don't bother too much on the ID when I'm doing a contract prep. I leave that up to the owner unless asked. :D

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Nice Prep!

It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt

 

-Mark Twain

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Very nice prepwork! Those plesiosaur vertebrae look really cool, and you brought them out well :)

-Christian

Opalised fossils are the best: a wonderful mix between paleontology and mineralogy!

 

Q. Where do dinosaurs study?

A. At Khaan Academy!...

 

My ResearchGate profile

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Looks like this was a fun project.  I had forgotten that you got yourself a super jack.  That jack has saved me countless hours of prep time.   Nice to have tools.

 

RB

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1 hour ago, RJB said:

Looks like this was a fun project.  I had forgotten that you got yourself a super jack.  That jack has saved me countless hours of prep time.   Nice to have tools.

 

RB

That tool is amazing! It's my new best friend.

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