Financing the Skeleton Crew - Carboniferous Bones Need a Home

Teeth and Fangs ( other   posts )  These Bones Need A Home   1000 Fossil Freaks Care - Become A Fossil Freak One of the rarest prizes discovered at Blue Beach, Nova Scotia Canada is this innocent-looking elongate bone. Along with the slab it was attached to, this is a portion of the lower jaw of a Basal Carboniferous tetrapod. It was the first tetrapod jaw ever found at Blue Beach. It was collected in 1999, loaned to colleagues in 2003 and still remains unreported.  For fifteen years this important find has been been buried in obscurity by scientists who haven't got around to describing all the fossils they have. We too are guilty of the same, because h ere at our small museum thousands of fossils have accumulated and there's over a hundred years worth of research awaits. Tetrapod jaw fragment (about 1.5 cm long) with 3 marginal teeth spaced at regular intervals, a narrow dorsal shelf, and a conspicuously striated surface where the dentar...

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...