#fossil matrix

[joibittle]

August 2023.

I'm thrilled to be a participant with a Position on Retreat AIR on Vancouver Island next month!

...Looking to the shell-builders and storytellers for clues.

July 27, 2023: The island was once a lagoon-like environment - salt + fresh water close to the shore - that somehow became closed off from the open ocean, trenches formed present day Lake Cowichan. Amphibious whales either died or performed a conscious mass beaching - intentionally moving to land - when the lagoon dried up, something sealed them off from the sea and fresh water flowed in the trench forming the lake. New hybrid segmented creatures took shape and started to thrive on the whale bone yard.

"Fossil Matrix"

(through the chain of craters)

charcoal on paper rolls

2023 ->

[uk-fossils]

Fossil Fish Bones in Coprolite Bed Matrix – Westbury Formation, Upper Triassic, Aust Cliff UK – Genuine UK Fossil with COA

This listing is for an exceptional specimen of fossil fish bones preserved in matrix, collected from the famous fish, reptile and coprolite bed at Aust Cliff, near Bristol, UK. This matrix originates from the Westbury Formation, part of the Penarth Group, dating back to the Upper Triassic period—approximately 205 million years ago.

The specimen contains clear fossilised fish bone fragments, showcasing the excellent fossil preservation quality for which this horizon is renowned. The Westbury Formation at Aust Cliff is famous globally among palaeontologists for its wealth of vertebrate fossils, including remains of fish, marine reptiles, coprolites, and even dinosaur material.

Your specimen was discovered by our experienced field team, Alister and Alison, on 07 April 2025, and has been expertly cleaned, prepped, and stabilised by Alison to reveal its fossil content with care and precision.

Geological Information:

Fossil Type: Fish bones (possibly from genera such as Saurichthys, Birgeria, or similar Triassic taxa)

Formation: Westbury Formation

Group: Penarth Group

Age: Upper Triassic (Rhaetian Stage)

Location: Aust Cliff, Bristol, England

Depositional Environment: Coastal marine lagoonal mudstone – shallow, anoxic marine conditions ideal for preservation

Biozone: Within the Psiloceras planorbis ammonite biozone (used for dating overlying beds)

Notable Features:

Genuine UK vertebrate fossil from a classic heritage site

Appears in original matrix from the fossil bed

Ready for study, display or collection

Each fossil is unique and the photo shows the actual specimen you will receive. Scale cube = 1cm. Please refer to the photo for full sizing.

100% Genuine Specimen – Certificate of Authenticity Included

All of our fossils are carefully selected, professionally prepared, and guaranteed to be 100% genuine. This item comes with a Certificate of Authenticity for your peace of mind.

A great addition for any fossil collector, educational display, or natural history enthusiast!

If you need a bundled listing with similar fossils from this bed (e.g., reptile bones, coprolites, or teeth), feel free to reach out!

[joibittlestudio]

2023 / Vancouver Island

micro/macro-chasms/cosms (reaction/response + chaotic order & some arrangements of things)

The thing is, each isolated tide pool holds it’s own spacetime-zone depending on the daily/yearly tide changes and shifting of the plates. Neap tide proved to be the most active - or at least visible to me in late summer. It's when the sun and moon are briefly at right angles from each other. The atomic clocks within these individual creatures is probably fast and fleeting, their umwelt perhaps driven by adaptation, which is not intentional, it just is.

WIPs

"Past-light Cone painting x3" oil on canvas

+ "Trace Matrix drawings x2" charcoal on paper rolls

[blueiscoool]

Iridescent Ammonite on Matrix Placenticeras costatum Late Cretaceous (approx. 71 million years ago) Bearpaw Formation, Alberta, Canada

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Please welcome Franconiasaurus brevispinus!

A new plesiosaur from the early Jurassic of Germany and a important missing link in plesiosaur evolution! Congratulations to the three authors, here the paper for those who haven't seen it

I have a rather personal connection to this specimen because me and Sven were on a road trip to the EAVP meeting in Munich when we came across this fossil in Bayreuth. It was quite the surprise walking into the collection and finding this, already largely out of the matrix.

It was quite funny to see Sven dive right in and after roughly 15 min of looking at it proclaiming, "pretty sure that's a new genus", I think we had a name for it already on the drive back

Franconiasaurus wasn't an apex predator, that time hadn't come yet for plesiosaurs, but it fills an important evolutionary gap between basal and more derived plesiosaur clades of the Jurassic. Here a little overview of animals that lived with it. This formation, the Jurensismergel, isn't as productive as the underlying Posidonia shale, but it's also a thinner, and less studied formation. Quite a few fossils still await a proper description or a name. These Temnodontosaurus for example.

A little background for my illustration. The Jurensismergel appears to preserve largely a deep water environment but I wanted to show the animal not in a blue void or with some dark sludge near the bottom so I gave it a patch reef to rest on, sourced from some locally available Muschelkalk. The whole presentation is very much inspired by the collection of the Museum in Bayreuth. down to the Temnodontosaurus rostrum jutting out of the ground here. Saurichthys is known from the Jurensismergel but the Dapedium and other fish were burrowed from Posidonia.

when you zoom in you can see crustaceans climbing over and cleaning the Franconiasaurs.

[srlgemstone]

Crab Fossil

Freshwater crab fossil (Potamon sp.) preserved in a natural cavity of travertine matrix.

[fossilprep]

Contract preparation is now available!

Contract prep is the process of sending me a fossil that needs work and I send it back to you looking like it belongs in a museum. For examples of my work see my public portfolio here.

Services include but are not limited to:

matrix removal

consolidation

reconstruction/gap filling

polishing

aesthetic restoration

color correction/painting (only upon request)

- and anything else that's required or specifically requested by the client.

Pricing is on a case-by-case basis that depends on material costs, hours, and complexity. Rush fees are also on the table, but the sooner the deadline the higher the fee is. If you're on a budget we can work to set up a payment plan.

Availability is first come, first served. If you have questions please don't hesitate to ask!

[spores-and-such]

BONE WORMS! 🦴🪱

Sorry for not posting in a while, things have been busy so I offer this post as atonement. Today I share with you a genus of polychaetes that I think is neat, the humble Osedax, AKA bone worms

If you like whalefalls then you’ve probably heard of these little freaks. These worms have adapted to the unique lifestyle of feeding on sunken vertebrate bones and absolutely thrive at whalefalls. Though most associated with whales, they are not picky and will feed on any type of bone. Amazingly, fossil evidence of their activity has been found from the Cretaceous on the bones of marine reptiles like mosasaurs, millions of years before whales even evolved!

You might think they’re feeding on the marrow or fats within the bone, but they actually feed on the collagen. To understand how they do this, we’ll need to pull one out of the bone and see what lies beneath…

what the hell is that?? This is the worm’s ‘root’, a unique structure that bores into the bone by secreting enzymes and acid that break down the bone’s matrix. The root is also home to endosymbiosic chemoorganotrophic bacteria. This is just a fancy way of saying symbiotic bacteria living in their tissue that feed on organic compounds. These bacteria metabolise the collagen into useful compounds for their worm host.

What’s even weirder is that only the female worms look like this. The males are microscopic and live within the female’s trunk. Over time, a female can amass a harem of multiple malewives. This dimorphism likely evolved due to it being rather difficult to find a mate on the ocean floor when you’re a sessile worm stuck to a bone. With a constant supply of sperm, the female can release hundreds of eggs into the water that hatch into free-swimming larvae which spread out and find new bones to colonise.

I’ll stop rambling there but I hope you guys find these things as interesting as I do :) I had to write a 2k essay on these things so if anyone has any questions about them feel free to ask 🪱🦴

[carionto]

Aliens are floored by tardigrades

Life is pretty resilient. It has to be, especially if the rest of the Galaxy thinks we're from a Deathworld. In comparison then, if their planets are not as demanding, would life there ever be under enough pressure to survive to go to the extreme lengths that some Earth creatures do? I think one of the most profound things aliens might learn from Earth and Humanity is just how powerful life itself can be.

That itself could shake their understanding of themselves - a billion year old civilization could never even conceive of a thing we accept as simple fact, ushering a revolution in thinking not seen in eons.

___________________________

The Galactic Coalition scientists are busying themselves with obtaining, analyzing, categorizing, and integrating the libraries of information Humanity has brought with them as they incorporate into the greater space faring matrix of civilizations.

A good grasp of Physics, though lacking in certain fields for now; unmatched Engineering doctrines, they really do think of everything, although, perhaps, better to say - they really do attempt everything, then take notes and improve for the next attempt.

Chemistry is another fine addition to the collective knowledge base, a disproportionate part of the catalogue is comprised entirely of explosive reagents and combinations - always good to know more about what NOT to do.

And Biology. Oh boy. What a chaotic but beautiful but also disturbing mess. Life on most planets has a long period of just chugging along, surviving as best it can, until eventually something has the bright idea to evolve the ability to have bright ideas. Then in almost no time at all (on a cosmic scale) a dominant intelligence emerges and civilization alongside it, and in the blink of an eye it finds itself exploring the stars.

A similar pattern happened on Earth, but interrupted alarmingly often by utter catastrophes. Humans call them Mass Extinctions. It is exceedingly rare to find life that can talk about its own extinction events. Kind of deflates the term a bit. Life on planets as inhospitable (by Galactic norms) as Earth tends to be found only as fossils, and almost always on the microscopic level - very rarely do they get the chance to form more complex and advanced lifeforms before the planet with its harsh conditions and scarce resources kills it just as randomly as it spawned it.

We were incredibly saddened to learn from the Humans that the biodiversity of Earth had dwindled by roughly 85% since they accidentally created that giant hole on their planet, and that it had already been on a steady decline before then. Even so, when they revealed there were still 2.4 million species alive on Earth was a shockingly high number. Most are on the brink of extinction, yes, but the fact remains that Earth is easily one of the most biodiverse planets in the Galaxy.

Then we started looking at each individual species and learned about the Tardigrade.

what

It is literally the toughest creature ever discovered, and it's not even close. At least, so far, we haven't looked at absolutely everything Earth has or had yet.

It can just... basically turn itself off and then back on again when the outside becomes livable again - Cryptobiosis, or suspending their metabolism, something we considered only possible through artificial means. And the levels of various extreme they can endure and still be alive would just be utterly ridiculous if they didn't give us samples to confirm for ourselves.

Then we came across the term Extremophile and just decided to take a day off.

[lalulutres]

Curled tightly in a near-perfect fetal position, the fossilized skeleton of a young dinosaur rests preserved within ancient sediment. Its delicate bones remain articulated, offering a lifelike glimpse into a moment frozen in time. The fine details of its vertebrae, limbs, and claws reveal how swiftly this creature must have perished and been buried, a rare event that allowed for such exceptional preservation. Enclosed in a stone matrix, this fossil serves as a hauntingly intimate snapshot of prehistoric life, as though the dinosaur had simply fallen asleep and never woken, forever immortalized by the slow passage of millennia.

#Paleontology

#DinosaurFossil

[echinoid-fossils-on-the-rocks]

Tiny mussel imprints

Sometimes I wonder how many tiny fossils, imprints of mussel or brachiopode we missing around in all the pieces of rocks, or rock matrix.

Meistens hier typisch Feuerstein Flint, brüchige gespaltene Scherben mit kleinen Muschelabrücke, teils mit Schalenmuster, aber keine art Bruch muschelig. Teils kristallisierte.

[uk-fossils]

BRADFORDIA LIOMPHALE Fossil Ammonite – Inferior Oolite, Jurassic Coast, Burton Bradstock, Dorset, UK

This listing features a beautifully preserved Bradfordia liomphale fossil ammonite discovered in the iconic Inferior Oolite strata of the Jurassic Coast at Burton Bradstock, Dorset, UK. This rare and scientifically notable ammonite dates back to the Middle Jurassic period and is an excellent example of the intricate shell structure and evolutionary significance of ammonites during this era.

Geological Unit: Inferior Oolite Group

Formation: Burton Bradstock Beds

Geological Period: Middle Jurassic

Stage: Early Bajocian

Biozone: Parkinsonia zone (based on locality association)

Depositional Environment: Shallow marine carbonate platform

Order: Ammonitida

Superfamily: Stephanoceratoidea

Family: Morphoceratidae

The specimen was carefully unearthed by our dedicated fossil hunters, Alister and Alison, on 17 January 2025. Following discovery, it was meticulously cleaned, stabilised, and prepped by Alison to highlight its ribbed pattern, detailed coiling, and preserved sutures.

Your fossil is set within a natural matrix from the site, retaining context from its original stratigraphic layer. A scale cube (1cm) is included in the photos for precise sizing—please refer to the image for complete dimensions. The photo represents the exact item you will receive.

All of our Fossils are 100% Genuine Specimens & come with a Certificate of Authenticity.

Whether you're an experienced fossil collector, a museum educator, or a geological enthusiast, this authentic ammonite fossil is a valuable and impressive addition to any collection.

[joibittlestudio]

summer studio tests:

...crater chains, shell-builders, chambers, segments and various rabbit skin glue preparations for Vancouver Island, August 2023.

[blueiscoool]

A FOSSIL GINKGO LEAF Colorado, USA

From the Paleocene (circa 58 - 55 million years ago) the clearly defined 31⁄4-inch wide Ginkgo cranei with well preserved striations, on original matrix. Reverse of matrix three further partial specimens of Ginkgo cranei.

63⁄4 x 67⁄8 x 3⁄4in. (17.1 x 17.5 x 1.9cm.).

[transparentfossil]

Fossil Shrimp Carpopenaeus from Lebanon in 2.375" x 1.625" Matrix

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Lula and Biden to announce clean energy partnership, defying Trump

The bilateral meeting between Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and U.S. President Joe Biden on the 19th will unveil a significant joint initiative on energy transition, a top priority for both leaders, according to official sources confirmed by GLOBO. Brazil's message is clear, official sources noted: "Regardless of the outcome" of the recent U.S. elections, which paved the way for Republican Donald Trump's return to the White House on January 20, "the Lula administration will uphold the agenda it's been building with the U.S."

Trump neglected the energy transition during his first term (2017-2021), and the topic lost steam following his election, but despite the evident disappointment his victory caused within the Brazilian government, the Presidential Palace and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have kept their plans for the bilateral meeting between the two heads of state intact.

The agreement will be similar to the Partnership for Workers' Rights announced by the two presidents in September 2023, which will also be part of the agenda of topics to be discussed by Lula and Biden in Rio. The energy transition partnership began being developed in early 2024, with the intention of starting implementation in 2025.

Combating climate change is a key topic in the shared agenda of Lula's Brazil and Biden's U.S., and it is expected to become a point of contention between the Brazilian president and Trump. Government sources admitted that "the future of the initiative is uncertain, but it will be announced." One goal is to change the energy matrix of both countries and promote renewable alternatives. Teams from both governments will begin working on an action plan that opposes Trump's energy vision. "We will advocate for clean energies, discuss biofuels, green hydrogen, electric cars," commented one of the consulted sources. This vision is far from the American president-elect, a proponent of fossil fuels and considered a climate change denier by environmentalists.

Continue reading.