Taxonomic Shark Displays- a work in progress

[fossilsonwheels]

Some of the labels got misaligned during printing but I’ll fix it later. Just glad to be getting some of these done finally. 

 

I like the current Heterodontus display. I think it’s solid. 

[fossilsonwheels]

I forgot to do the genus/species in bold on the Ginsu labels but I’ll fix it later. I like this one. I feel it’s a good representation of Cretoxyrhina. 

[fossilsonwheels]

The Ctenacanthiformes are also pretty solid. I gave Phoebodus and Thrinacodus a separate display. I like the diversity of genera in this display. 

[fossilsonwheels]

Haven’t been actively collecting lately or doing much of anything fossil related but I did get some work done on the displays. Turned out to be a bigger project than I expected. Kinda ran out of steam and money to work on them but I got a few done. 

 

Separated the Hastalis and GW teeth. I like the GW display. We had some help from @siteseer with the California teeth, @gigantoraptor provided a Chilean specimen via trade, the Aussie tooth came from @Untitled, and the Georgia tooth was the fossil we took when Sara the Traveling Ceratopsian came to visit. All things considered, I’m pretty satisfied with this one. Some good sized teeth, 8 over 2”, good locations and some high quality teeth. Top row represents the line of evolution from C. hastalis to C. carcharias with Peruvian teeth. 

[fossilsonwheels]

A personal favorite is the humble Hexachus display. A lot of help from our TFF friends @Troodon, @siteseer, @Anomotodon, @Untitled, and @JBMugu all contributed to this. 

 

Great locations, good temporal range. I think we did the best we could with this one. A very important shark going forward for any future education work. 

[fossilsonwheels]

The Hammerhead display. A shark you have to talk about if you’re doing shark education. Their adaptations and biology are too cool. 

 

Not a bad display. I need to redo some labels and it’s a little sparse but I’m happy with it. @sharkdoctor, @siteseer, @Untitled @JBMuguand @digit contributed some of the teeth or the matrix that provided teeth. A nice diversity of locations I think. 

[fossilsonwheels]

Thresher teeth. Another super cool shark that deserves a lot of discussion in the education programs. 

 

I was unsuccessful in finding a cusped or a serrated Thresher tooth but that’s ok. Some nice teeth and good locations. @siteseer, @Untitled, @sharkdoctor, @digit, @JBMugu helped us with teeth or matrix that provided teeth. 

[siteseer]

Those displays look great, Kurt.  You see Hexanchus from different parts of the world (west and east coast of North America; South America, western and eastern Europe) across at least 70 million years and yet its teeth haven't changed much. 

 

You might be able to get some early hammerhead teeth from mid-late Eocene sites in Alabama.  You could get some from the late Oligocene Chandler Bridge Formation, Summerville, SC - not common, though.

 

Yeah, it's never been easy to get the cusped or serrated thresher teeth.  It seems to be even tougher now.

 

Jess

 

 

[sharkdoctor]

Great displays, Kurt! So inspirational to see these come together!

[fossilsonwheels]

On 1/8/2022 at 10:12 PM, siteseer said:

Those displays look great, Kurt.  You see Hexanchus from different parts of the world (west and east coast of North America; South America, western and eastern Europe) across at least 70 million years and yet its teeth haven't changed much. 

 

You might be able to get some early hammerhead teeth from mid-late Eocene sites in Alabama.  You could get some from the late Oligocene Chandler Bridge Formation, Summerville, SC - not common, though.

 

Yeah, it's never been easy to get the cusped or serrated thresher teeth.  It seems to be even tougher now.

 

Jess

 

 

Hi Jess

 

Yeah I agree on the Hexanchus display. I think it is pretty good. The Seven Gill came out really nicely too. I’ll post that one this week. There is a third Hexanchiformes display that is not finished. It’s got Notidanodon and Weltonia. I think I can probably help that one by trading. We will see. 

 

I need to get on finding an Eocene Hammerhead. I wasn’t sure if they appear in the Eocene or Oligocene so that’s good info as always my friend ! 

 

I may continue looking for a cusped Thresher. I saw a few serrated Threshers pop up but the price was far too high. I can live without one lol 

 

I will have a few more finished this week. Orectolobiformes, Catsharks, Xenacanthiformes, Carcharhinus, Otodus , and Squalus are all just needing labels. Making progress at least

 

Kurt

[fossilsonwheels]

On 1/9/2022 at 10:10 AM, sharkdoctor said:

Great displays, Kurt! So inspirational to see these come together!

Thank you Aaron. It’s nice to see it finally come together. It’s cool to see the contributions from our TFF friends that shape pretty much all of them. 

 

Btw I found a couple of interesting teeth in the Calvert matrix. I’m going to post them on the forum this week. Not sure what they are. Found some KILLER Scyliorhinus teeth including a tiny one in situ ! It’s really productive matrix so far. 

[fossilsonwheels]

I really like the Heterodontus display. @sharkdoctor recently included a couple of Heterodontus in a trade that helped us finish this. Our first east coast US teeth and our only Paleocene teeth. Great locations, great temporal range. Lots of help from TFF members @siteseer, @Untitled, @Anomotodon, @will stevenson, @JBMugu contributed to this display. 

[fossilsonwheels]

Split the Echinorhinus from the other Squaliformes. I like the results. I think eventually that split will occur in the scientific community. The DNA says they are closer to Angelsharks and Sawsharks. 

@JBMugu helped us out with 4 of the STH teeth and that matrix that provided the denticles. 

 

I doubt I will ever be able to fill a larger display with Bramble teeth. Not easy to find in my experience. Happy to have what we have. 

[fossilsonwheels]

My favorite display. Very proud of the Squaliformes that we ended up with. This one would not have been possible without our TFF friends. @Troodon, @siteseer, @Untitled, @will stevenson, @digit helped make this happen. 

 

Not only are there some cool genera but the locations are pretty cool as well. Good temporal range and some of our rarest teeth. The adaptations of these sharks makes this a fantastic educational piece. This display holds the fossil teeth of the longest living Vertebrate on the planet which also happens to be the slowest swimming fish.The deepest dwelling shark. One of the smallest sharks. I believe the largest tooth per body size. Sharks that create their own light. I could go on lol 

 

I haven’t given up on a Lantern Shark tooth yet. Or Deania. Or Oxynotus. Definitely plan on continuing the hunt for Squaliformes from the fossil depths. 

[digit]

11 hours ago, fossilsonwheels said:

The adaptations of these sharks makes this a fantastic educational piece. This display holds the fossil teeth of the longest living Vertebrate on the planet which also happens to be the slowest swimming fish.The deepest dwelling shark. One of the smallest sharks. I believe the largest tooth per body size. Sharks that create their own light. I could go on lol

Yup. A really cool order of sharks, the Squaliformes. This one order (of the eight orders) contains 126 of the 512 described species (roughly a quarter of the total). I had a set of fish flash cards (yup, science geek as a kid) from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and the Cookiecutter Shark was among those hundred or so cards, each with a color drawing on the front and fish facts on the back. How could a kid not love a tiny shark with a ferocious outsized dentition that bites ping-pong size plugs of flesh from larger fishes and whales--and returns to the deep where its belly glows with bio-luminescence to mask its outline. That such a shark exists and is not simply a creation of a fertile imagination reminds me once again that evolution produces "endless forms most beautiful".

 

I've made a display of my own. For a little exhibit at the public museum of the FLMNH on campus (at Powell Hall) I've made a display featuring a hypothetical composite dentition of the extinct cookiecutter Isistius triangulus. I've searched through countless 5-gallon buckets of matrix from Cookiecutter Creek here in Florida, looking for the rarer species that can be found in that odd little creek with a wealth of micro-chondrichthyans. In doing so I have accumulated a nice little stock of Isistius teeth. The idea came to me some years back to start organizing these teeth for this project. I picked up an inexpensive weekly pill container with seven compartments for the days of the week. I made labels for the different tooth positions that are identifiable and organized the more complete teeth as they turned up while picking.

 

 

The symphyseal teeth along the mid-line of the jaw are distinctive as they have both thinned overlapping edges on the same face of the tooth. The commissural teeth are distinctive as they are at the very ends of the lower jaw--the corners of the mouth where the lower articulates with the upper jaw. These teeth are at the end of the line and overlap only the tooth to the front of it so they have a tab-like extension to the rear clearly identifying them as commissurals. The posterior teeth tend to be smaller and the angle between the triangular crown and the root are more slanted (the more anterior teeth are much straighter). The two "undetermined" bins are for the less distinctive anterior-lateral teeth for which there is little clue as to their exact position in the lower jaw. Upper cookiecutter teeth are virtually unknown from the fossil record--one specimen from France. They are much tinier (~1 mm) and have more needle-like crowns as opposed to the triangular cutting blades of the lowers.

 

I hoped that I had collected enough specimens to find reasonably matching candidates for all of the tooth positions. The next trick was to determine an estimated count of the teeth in the lower jaw of the extinct species Isistius triangulus. The common modern-day species, I. brasiliensis, has an average of 29 teeth in the lower jaw (always an odd number due to the single central symphyseal tooth). There is also a much more rare species (not that cookiecutter sharks are commonly encountered) called the Large-tooth Cookiecutter Shark, I. plutodus, that has (you guessed it) much larger teeth and thus fewer in the lower jaw--19 in total. So I had a workable range from 19 to 29 (in steps of 2). The teeth of the common cookiecutter are more narrow than the fossil species so I knew I should probably have fewer teeth than 29 in this hypothetical articulation. My options were 27, 25, 23 or 21 and so I couldn't pick an exact average mid-point between the two species. I decided to go with 25 teeth (closer to the more common extant species).

 

Took a little time to organize a set that matched in color and size. Not a perfect dentition but then I didn't have an extant specimen to work from and I had a large number but not infinite teeth to choose from. I ended up assembling this dentition under the microscope. The teeth overlap in life and so I wanted to tack them together with glue so they formed an integrated set. I knew they'd have to be re-adjusted as I built-up the set so I chose to use B-72 consolidant (a plastic dissolved in acetone). Unlike cyanoacrylate (superglue) the B-72 can be softened with the application of acetone. Took me a while to get them lined-up to my liking. I picked out an appropriately small picture frame and used a tiny square of my wife's quilting batting for a background. Since I used the mat to keep the tooth-set from pressing up against the glass I needed to tack the dentition in place on the backing. An additional bit of B-72 held the dentition secure. When this is on display viewers won't be able to see the details of these tiny teeth (the largest around 4mm across) so I composed an accompanying  micro-photograph with scale and had that photo printed.

 

Not nearly as diverse as Kurt's displays but I felt it was a fun project and a nice way to present one of my all-time favorite sharks. After all, who else would be mad enough to construct such a dentition?

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

 

[fossilsonwheels]

14 hours ago, digit said:

Yup. A really cool order of sharks, the Squaliformes. This one order (of the eight orders) contains 126 of the 512 described species (roughly a quarter of the total). I had a set of fish flash cards (yup, science geek as a kid) from the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago and the Cookiecutter Shark was among those hundred or so cards, each with a color drawing on the front and fish facts on the back. How could a kid not love a tiny shark with a ferocious outsized dentition that bites ping-pong size plugs of flesh from larger fishes and whales--and returns to the deep where its belly glows with bio-luminescence to mask its outline. That such a shark exists and is not simply a creation of a fertile imagination reminds me once again that evolution produces "endless forms most beautiful".

 

I've made a display of my own. For a little exhibit at the public museum of the FLMNH on campus (at Powell Hall) I've made a display featuring a hypothetical composite dentition of the extinct cookiecutter Isistius triangulus. I've searched through countless 5-gallon buckets of matrix from Cookiecutter Creek here in Florida, looking for the rarer species that can be found in that odd little creek with a wealth of micro-chondrichthyans. In doing so I have accumulated a nice little stock of Isistius teeth. The idea came to me some years back to start organizing these teeth for this project. I picked up an inexpensive weekly pill container with seven compartments for the days of the week. I made labels for the different tooth positions that are identifiable and organized the more complete teeth as they turned up while picking.

 

 

The symphyseal teeth along the mid-line of the jaw are distinctive as they have both thinned overlapping edges on the same face of the tooth. The commissural teeth are distinctive as they are at the very ends of the lower jaw--the corners of the mouth where the lower articulates with the upper jaw. These teeth are at the end of the line and overlap only the tooth to the front of it so they have a tab-like extension to the rear clearly identifying them as commissurals. The posterior teeth tend to be smaller and the angle between the triangular crown and the root are more slanted (the more anterior teeth are much straighter). The two "undetermined" bins are for the less distinctive anterior-lateral teeth for which there is little clue as to their exact position in the lower jaw. Upper cookiecutter teeth are virtually unknown from the fossil record--one specimen from France. They are much tinier (~1 mm) and have more needle-like crowns as opposed to the triangular cutting blades of the lowers.

 

I hoped that I had collected enough specimens to find reasonably matching candidates for all of the tooth positions. The next trick was to determine an estimated count of the teeth in the lower jaw of the extinct species Isistius triangulus. The common modern-day species, I. brasiliensis, has an average of 29 teeth in the lower jaw (always an odd number due to the single central symphyseal tooth). There is also a much more rare species (not that cookiecutter sharks are commonly encountered) called the Large-tooth Cookiecutter Shark, I. plutodus, that has (you guessed it) much larger teeth and thus fewer in the lower jaw--19 in total. So I had a workable range from 19 to 29 (in steps of 2). The teeth of the common cookiecutter are more narrow than the fossil species so I knew I should probably have fewer teeth than 29 in this hypothetical articulation. My options were 27, 25, 23 or 21 and so I couldn't pick an exact average mid-point between the two species. I decided to go with 25 teeth (closer to the more common extant species).

 

Took a little time to organize a set that matched in color and size. Not a perfect dentition but then I didn't have an extant specimen to work from and I had a large number but not infinite teeth to choose from. I ended up assembling this dentition under the microscope. The teeth overlap in life and so I wanted to tack them together with glue so they formed an integrated set. I knew they'd have to be re-adjusted as I built-up the set so I chose to use B-72 consolidant (a plastic dissolved in acetone). Unlike cyanoacrylate (superglue) the B-72 can be softened with the application of acetone. Took me a while to get them lined-up to my liking. I picked out an appropriately small picture frame and used a tiny square of my wife's quilting batting for a background. Since I used the mat to keep the tooth-set from pressing up against the glass I needed to tack the dentition in place on the backing. An additional bit of B-72 held the dentition secure. When this is on display viewers won't be able to see the details of these tiny teeth (the largest around 4mm across) so I composed an accompanying  micro-photograph with scale and had that photo printed.

 

Not nearly as diverse as Kurt's displays but I felt it was a fun project and a nice way to present one of my all-time favorite sharks. After all, who else would be mad enough to construct such a dentition?

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

 

Hi Ken 

 

That is such a cool display and great information on how you put it together. The photo of the teeth is something we’re going copy in the future. It’s really important for people to see how cool the small shark teeth are. That dentition is just fantastic. 

 

It must have been an astonishing amount of time searching and amount of matrix to search. 

 

It really is a diverse order of sharks with awesome and strange adaptations. 

 

Kurt

[fossilsonwheels]

I am pretty proud that we ended up being able to fill two 12” and an 8” display with Squaliformes including the Brambles. 

This display has Squalus and related sharks. Good temporal range, interesting locations including our only tooth from Japan. The Dogfish are fun to talk about. Great variation in habitats. 

 

@sharkdoctor and @JBMugu provided matrix from Calvert and STH that yielded quite a few teeth. @Troodon, @siteseer, @Untitled and @will stevenson helped provide some great teeth too. 

Edited January 12, 2022 by fossilsonwheels

[fossilsonwheels]

Catsharks !! A great education shark because of the diversity of extant genera and habitats plus a long temporal range. 

 

A surprisingly difficult to shark to collect fossil examples of in my experience. @siteseer, @sharkdoctor, @Untitled, and @will stevenson contributed to this one. 

 

I would love to find more matrix to search that contains Catshark teeth and I have not completely given up on finding an STH Scyliorhinus but I like what we have. 

Edited January 12, 2022 by fossilsonwheels

[digit]

8 hours ago, fossilsonwheels said:

The photo of the teeth is something we’re going copy in the future.

I'm in the mode of doing micro-photography anyway as I'm photographing finds from the Montbrook site for a visual guide to the volunteers (and teachers with their science classes) who are also picking matrix from this site. The original idea for photographs to enhance micros likely hearkens back to a display I saw that @Al Dente created. It was mentioned here early last year:

 

http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/102579-taxonomic-shark-displays-a-work-in-progress/&do=findComment&comment=1262024

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Fossildude19]

I took the liberty of Pinning this topic.

It is a great educational thread, and informative in so many ways.

Thanks for bringing this kind of content to the Forum, @fossilsonwheels  !

[digit]

 

[fossilsonwheels]

10 hours ago, digit said:

I'm in the mode of doing micro-photography anyway as I'm photographing finds from the Montbrook site for a visual guide to the volunteers (and teachers with their science classes) who are also picking matrix from this site. The original idea for photographs to enhance micros likely hearkens back to a display I saw that @Al Dente created. It was mentioned here early last year:

 

http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/102579-taxonomic-shark-displays-a-work-in-progress/&do=findComment&comment=1262024

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

You are correct on @Al Dente sharing that display and for suggesting the photos. Credit where credit is due ! 

[fossilsonwheels]

Seven Gill display is done. Had I tracked down another Heptranchias tooth, I would’ve split this but I am happy with it as is. 

 

@Troodon, @siteseer, @Anomotodon and @sharkdoctor helped us out quite a bit. Lots of European teeth. It includes our only teeth from Poland. I think we put together a pretty good representation. 

[fossilsonwheels]

Mako display done ! Lots of desori/oxyrinchus teeth, not so much with retroflexus but oh well. 

 

@siteseer, @JBMugu, @Untitled, and @sharkdoctor helped us out with some great teeth. 

 

Great California and Peruvian teeth. A couple of 2” monsters. I’m happy with this one for sure. A large, solid display for one of the cooler sharks swimming in the ocean. 

[fossilsonwheels]

I redid the labels for the Ginsu display and we can call this done. The Mako of the Cretaceous lol My favorite Cretaceous shark and one that is great for educational reasons. 

 

@Troodon, @siteseer, @Untitled, @Captcrunch227, @gigantoraptor, @Anomotodon Helped us out with some great teeth. 

 

We have the evolutionary line/chronospecies, some great locations and even slipped in a pair of 2” monsters. The verts add a nice visual touch I think. One my favorite displays and one I’d say I’m pretty proud of.