Financing the Skeleton Crew - Carboniferous Bones Need a Home

A Little Fish with an Unfriendly Bite   The Palaeoniscoid     (photo art: Nasty palaeoniscoid by Maniraptora) Here is a beautiful example of a lower jaw, with sharp teeth, of a 350 million year old palaeoniscoid fish from the Lower Carboniferous of Blue Beach, Nova Scotia, Canada. The specimen actually came from the small unnamed creek that follows the access road and drains into the Minas Basin at Blue Beach.   T his part of the creek is a rare location to find such a specimen, but lo and behold, that important fossil was just sitting there. Historically, nothing of importance has ever been found in the creek - all the good stuff comes from the beach itself. This specimen is preserved 3-dimensionally in a prominent clayshale bed. Very few intact skeletons are known from the Blue Beach locality, and most of those now known are recent finds being made by the Blue Beach Museum, and by some of the visitors it attracts. Here we see the scales...

(Photo credit: Gerald MacKenzie) Earliest Carboniferous tetrapod tracks from Blue Beach (Nova Scotia, Canada) are found on more than 80 stratigraphic levels within the deposit. These 'track-bearing' layers of sandstone/siltstone/shale are exposed along several kms of shoreline, and are constantly revealed by the erosive force of twice-d aily tides in the Bay of Fundy.  (photo credit: Christopher Mansky) Most of the footprints are preserved as 'undertracks', meaning they are from 'lower levels' than the ones' traversed by these creatures. Very few finds represent the 'actual track level' of the trace-maker, so most of the footprints display incomplete footmarks at best, and may be difficult to recognize until one becomes accustomed to the peculiarities of track preservation. Todays' example is an undertrack from one of the better layers, and shows nearly-complete foot morphology.  (Photo credit: Christopher Mansky) The p...

Let's Build A 'Paleo-Centre' at Blue Beach Blue Beach  Nova Scotia  Canada 'A PALEO-MAVERICKS DREAM' A "fossil lagerstatte" is a place where the evidence coming from the fossils provides a unique window into the past, making it invaluable to science. Lagerstattes are irreplacable and one of a kind.  The term comes from the German word, literally meaning "place of deposit" - but in paleo it has come to me an "motherlode".  (Photo credit: Gerald MacKenzie) Blue Beach, in Nova Scotia (Canada) is the oldest Carboniferous fossil lagerstatte, with a wide array of fossil evidence that informs us about life roughly 350,000,000 years ago, when the first tetrapod groups began radiating into key terrestrial groups.  (Photo credit: Google) The evidence from Blue Beach is proven to be rich in not only vertebrate bones: it also contains a diversity of plants and invertebrates, and an amazing diversity of trace fossils. Blue ...