Whats The Best Fossil You Destroyed?

[kolleamm]

Does anyone have any bad stories about a time they found a rare fossil and somehow damaged it pretty badly during prep or watever? My story, this one time I found a huge miocene fish in shale but the bones were light colored after 2 hours of work to get it out of the ground i put it in a box and skateboard home 10 miles holding it in the box, once I get home I prep it for 3 hours and it looks good,I decided to apply super glue to it so that it doesnt get damaged,and guess what happened? Since the bones were so light colored on the light colored shale, about 80% of the fossils details were gone, i was so mad. How about you? Im really curious to see.

[tracer]

i haven't destroyed any fossils unintentionally, but i do make my son carry anything cool until it gets home so he can't blame me if there's an issue

[Phoenixflood]

As a teenager, I crushed a 2, maybe 3 inch chubutensis in my packpack going to school. I also dropped a worn 4" gray meg on cement and chipped the tip :notfair:

[palaeopix]

I have ruined many (too many) great specimens because I was impatient. Most of the damage has been done while trying to field trim a specimen with a few blows of a hammer. The result is that one very nice specimen turns into many smaller not so nice specimens. I once found a perfect pair of trilobites on a huge boulder and proceeded to extract the fossils only to smash them into a billion pieces. Turns out the trilobites were new to science and I have yet to find another example. Now I try to curb my urge to trim specimens in the field but I still whack rocks indiscriminately. I guess I'll never learn!!!

[Stonebreaker]

I believe I'd actually have to FIND fossils to be able to destroy them.....

[THobern]

I believe I'd actually have to FIND fossils to be able to destroy them.....

Not necessarily; 4 1/8" Angustiden on a stone floor...

[jpc]

One of the first oreodont skulls I found... I managed to bust it up cuz I was being impatient and unknowing. This inspired me to learn how to make a plaster jacket like they tell you in the books. That was in 1982... snarge near 30 yrs ago. Holy Criminey, Batman. Just a few weekends ago, I had my first plaster jacket fail on me. Didn't undercut it enough and almost all the contents fell out the bottom when I rolled it. Almost all. The half of a turtle shell I was collecting mostly stayed up in the jacket and was quick field prepped by the matrix all falling out the bottom. Just goes to show that even 30 yrs into this, don't get too cocky. Another time I dropped a jacket that was not top-jacketed. Mosasaur vert pieces went flying all over the place. Haven't prepped that one yet. I cracked the only fossil bird I've ever found and prepped when I moved. Dang. Now I'm depressed and going to bed.

[kolleamm]

One of the first oreodont skulls I found... I managed to bust it up cuz I was being impatient and unknowing. This inspired me to learn how to make a plaster jacket like they tell you in the books. That was in 1982... snarge near 30 yrs ago. Holy Criminey, Batman. Just a few weekends ago, I had my first plaster jacket fail on me. Didn't undercut it enough and almost all the contents fell out the bottom when I rolled it. Almost all. The half of a turtle shell I was collecting mostly stayed up in the jacket and was quick field prepped by the matrix all falling out the bottom. Just goes to show that even 30 yrs into this, don't get too cocky. Another time I dropped a jacket that was not top-jacketed. Mosasaur vert pieces went flying all over the place. Haven't prepped that one yet. I cracked the only fossil bird I've ever found and prepped when I moved. Dang. Now I'm depressed and going to bed.

wow, im really sorry. but its really nice to know im not alone

[Coco]

One day, I brought back a young salenidae of the champagne area, it is far from to me and I went there only once. It was the only one salenidae that I had found, it was beautiful, clean, small (approximately 1 cm = 0 " 2/5), kept preserved.

At the house, I wanted to scan it to obtain a photo (because it was too small to make a beautiful photo with my camera).

I put the sea urchin on the scanner, I closed quite slowly the lid of the scanner, I done the scannérisation, and I looked at the result on my computer. And there! Oh misfortune! A photo appeared of a heap of dust! I could not believe it, and when I raised the lid of the scanner, the small sea urchin was broken in a lot of small pieces...

Coco

[FrozenInTime]

Last year when hunting for trilobites near Wenlock Edge, in Great Britain, I suddenly grabbed a piece out of the rockface and saw it had the negative side of a big and perfect Dalmanites myops in it, the thing was.. I had just taken off all the rock that was in front of the negative, and apparently I had discarded the piece with the positive side into the shallow river behind me....

Like a madman I walked around for several hours trying to find that positive side of what must have been my most impressive find ever. I never managed to find it, but the negative is still a painful token of what I probably destroyed... I still have it laying around somewhere, but it just hurts by looking at it.

What was even more painful though, that while I was looking for my positive side, the guy collecting together with us found a perfect Dalmanites caudatus, he practically pulled the rock it was in from under where I was sitting gobsmacked staring at the rockface which had been so unforgiving to me.....

Maybe I didn't exactly destroy it directly, but it felt even worse....

cheers,

Mark

Edited June 14, 2010 by FrozenInTime

[cousin it]

Years ago, I was working on describing an undescribed lichid trilobite from my area. I had pulled 11 cephalons, and two pygidiums from one member of the formation. While visiting another outcrop, in another member, I noticed a cephalon that was very similar to my work specimens in a large slab of rock. So, I pulled out my trusty Vlcek chisel, hammer, and started making my cuts. After completing the "mote" around the thing, I had the last chop to free it.

When I struck, I noticed a few shards flying off in various directions... I found nothing. To this day, I console myself with the assumption that it was one that had been described years before.

In the ones that I was working on, the occipital lobe furrows didn't circumtend the circumference of the lobes, in other families, it did.

I have worked the same outcrop for years, and I have never seen another lichid from that locality. But, someday???

[oilshale]

This happened in Messel to my friends: A couple of friends dropped by and mentioned that they've found a huge oyster bank in their claim. Oysters in sweet water..., in Messel...??? I had to see this!

Well, it turned out to be a huge crocodile (nearly 3m). Not much left, except part of the snout, a couple of teeth and one hind limb. Made me sick!

[Auspex]

...I cracked the only fossil bird I've ever found and prepped when I moved...

[JimB88]

I have collected many a half blastoid that were whole when found trying to get them out of the matrix! And dont even get me started on the Pennington siltstone! :angry: :angry:

[Rover]

I can honestly say that I've ne... wait, no. There was one very nice, rather large (about 6" across) shell that I dropped in a parking lot. Then there were the bucketloads of Colorado matrix, very rich with marine fossils, that somebody intentionally LEFT while I was moving. Apparently,the movers thought it was just a bunch of rocks.

[Angus Stydens]

Back in the late 1980's I made my first attempt at plaster jacketing a whale skull in a late oligocene marine bed. I had helped jacket some while volunteering with the Charleston, S.C. museum, so I thought I had a pretty good grasp on just how to do it. The skull I was removing was fairly small, maybe 16 inches in total length (these late oligocene whales were mostly about the size of porpoises). I was standing in a narrow creek, thigh deep in very fast moving water while I worked on the skull at about waist height in a vertical bank. I carefully dug all around the skull, leaving it encased in a sandy-clay matrix and perched on a pedestal of dirt. Before I started wrapping it with wet newspaper (the preliminary step before applying wet plaster bandages) the whale skull looked absolutely perfectly prepared to wrap,just like a giant, oblong egg sitting on a nice, even pedestal of dirt. Well... so far so good...

As soon as I tried to wrap some wet strips of newspaper around the block, I had a strong clue that I did not leave the pedestal of dirt big enough, and I had undercut the block too much. The clue was that as soon as I put the first strip of wet paper on the block, the whole skull suddenly fell off the pedestal, broke into pieces against my upper thighs, and then splashed right down into the rushing water. By the time I grabbed for it, which was really a waste of time at that point, all I got was a couple of handsful of matrix. Miraculously, I managed to grab a small piece of one mandible with two teeth in it, while the rest quickly dissolved and was washed who knows how far down stream. And yes, I did utter a few words that were not part of paleontological jargon. I was highly #####, but I never made that mistake again.

In addition to this first real catastrophe, I have smashed or split probably a few dozen megalodon teeth over the years while digging in a local Pleistocene deposit. The megs in this layer are re-worked out of a Miocene deposit that has long since disappeared. The only way to find them is to dig randomly in the sandy clay layer with a hand pick and hope you uncover one before you hit it. Inevitably though, there will be some times when you smash right through the middle of a killer tooth, but it just the luck of the draw.

[jpc]

Auspex, don't worry, the fossil is still in great shape, despite the fact that I also blew away a piece of the shaft of the tibiotarsus. Only the shaft. I swept the tabletop and floor three times looking for that piece.

[kolleamm]

Back in the late 1980's I made my first attempt at plaster jacketing a whale skull in a late oligocene marine bed. I had helped jacket some while volunteering with the Charleston, S.C. museum, so I thought I had a pretty good grasp on just how to do it. The skull I was removing was fairly small, maybe 16 inches in total length (these late oligocene whales were mostly about the size of porpoises). I was standing in a narrow creek, thigh deep in very fast moving water while I worked on the skull at about waist height in a vertical bank. I carefully dug all around the skull, leaving it encased in a sandy-clay matrix and perched on a pedestal of dirt. Before I started wrapping it with wet newspaper (the preliminary step before applying wet plaster bandages) the whale skull looked absolutely perfectly prepared to wrap,just like a giant, oblong egg sitting on a nice, even pedestal of dirt. Well... so far so good...

As soon as I tried to wrap some wet strips of newspaper around the block, I had a strong clue that I did not leave the pedestal of dirt big enough, and I had undercut the block too much. The clue was that as soon as I put the first strip of wet paper on the block, the whole skull suddenly fell off the pedestal, broke into pieces against my upper thighs, and then splashed right down into the rushing water. By the time I grabbed for it, which was really a waste of time at that point, all I got was a couple of handsful of matrix. Miraculously, I managed to grab a small piece of one mandible with two teeth in it, while the rest quickly dissolved and was washed who knows how far down stream. And yes, I did utter a few words that were not part of paleontological jargon. I was highly #####, but I never made that mistake again.

In addition to this first real catastrophe, I have smashed or split probably a few dozen megalodon teeth over the years while digging in a local Pleistocene deposit. The megs in this layer are re-worked out of a Miocene deposit that has long since disappeared. The only way to find them is to dig randomly in the sandy clay layer with a hand pick and hope you uncover one before you hit it. Inevitably though, there will be some times when you smash right through the middle of a killer tooth, but it just the luck of the draw.

wow quite a story, but you gotta admit everyones had one of these experiences and it only makes us smarter for the next time we find something rare.

[kolleamm]

Last year when hunting for trilobites near Wenlock Edge, in Great Britain, I suddenly grabbed a piece out of the rockface and saw it had the negative side of a big and perfect Dalmanites myops in it, the thing was.. I had just taken off all the rock that was in front of the negative, and apparently I had discarded the piece with the positive side into the shallow river behind me....

Like a madman I walked around for several hours trying to find that positive side of what must have been my most impressive find ever. I never managed to find it, but the negative is still a painful token of what I probably destroyed... I still have it laying around somewhere, but it just hurts by looking at it.

What was even more painful though, that while I was looking for my positive side, the guy collecting together with us found a perfect Dalmanites caudatus, he practically pulled the rock it was in from under where I was sitting gobsmacked staring at the rockface which had been so unforgiving to me.....

Maybe I didn't exactly destroy it directly, but it felt even worse....

cheers,

Mark

you remind me of this one time i found a really nice gastropod, i split the rock open, the positive side fell down the hill and i was left with just the negative.I just threw away the negative i was so mad.

[seanm]

When I was about 13 we was holidaying in somerset. While down the beach I saw the edge of what looked like a good size ammo. 3 hours later i managed to pull out a 10" Caloceras Johnstoni with the full rainbow of colours only to trip over and drop it on the way back to the car!!! Totally destroyed.

That was a BAD DAY.

Sean

[Nandomas]

The airport luggage crew destroyed this beauty from Grifton quarry, NC (now closed!!!) :(

Edited June 17, 2010 by Fossili Veraci

[Perfect Castaway]

I'm really sorry this happened to you but if it's any consolation, it made me laugh out loud. Thank you.

One day, I brought back a young salenidae of the champagne area, it is far from to me and I went there only once. It was the only one salenidae that I had found, it was beautiful, clean, small (approximately 1 cm = 0 " 2/5), kept preserved.

At the house, I wanted to scan it to obtain a photo (because it was too small to make a beautiful photo with my camera).

I put the sea urchin on the scanner, I closed quite slowly the lid of the scanner, I done the scannérisation, and I looked at the result on my computer. And there! Oh misfortune! A photo appeared of a heap of dust! I could not believe it, and when I raised the lid of the scanner, the small sea urchin was broken in a lot of small pieces...

Coco

[David]

OH...héhéhé! This one makes me laugh a lot too !!!

i have several stories...

first one:

6 years ago, after i finished to prepare a plate with 3 keichousaurs i layed it (in my cellar) on the top of an empty plastic crates pile.

Sadly, my dog saw a cat and ran through the plastic crates...Plate fell down and broke in 8 "big" pieces + sooo many small ones...

Second one:

last summer i was preparing a small plate with 2 uncommon Guizhouamia bellula (triassic fishes from China) i was delicately laying soft acid on it...fishes became visible BUT what i didn't knew at that time is that they were coming from a very soft layer on which it is not adviced to lay water...

So acid + water i used to wash the plate has been sucked by the matrix....when i took it in my hand it just fell into 100 little pieces....

third one:

i sometime prepare silicified fossils contained in calcareous matrix. So i use chlorhydric (muriatic) acid.

One day i saw a 10cm seestar arm extruding from a piece of that particular layer...

I layed it a an acid bath as usual but with more water and with a look every 5 minutes to not destroy it...

Well....it didn't needed 5 minutes to dissapear.... it was the only piece that wasn't silicified that i every had from this layer.......

soo many other experiences but as i remember these are the « best » ones...

[Coco]

Hi,

Perfect Castaway -> it is the positive side of this incident : make laugh !

Richard -> I see that you are at the right place for a competition of clumsiness

Coco

[West4me]

I found a crusher shark tooth the other day, the largest I have seen so far. I left it where I found it until I got a larger chisel to work the rock. I went back with my 8 year old daughter to try and remove it from the large limestone boulder. This boulder was on a hill amongst many other large boulders and we had to do a lot of scrambling around. I am working away on on this rock and she is standing above me taking pictures of the surroundings with my brand new Canon DSLR. She slips and falls as I am coming down with my mallet and I see her falling out of the corner of my eye. I smash the tooth as she falls next to me, my camera bouncing off the rocks.

Daughter ok, just a couple scrapes and some tears. And some yelling at me about how she never wants to go out with me again

Camera fine.

Tooth smashed