A watercolor diagram showing a stratigraphic column and the effects of shallowing marine depositional environment on mollusk shell and marine mammal skeletal preservation.
My take, as a watercolorist and scientist - is that they could have finished the whole thing using watercolor, and a little bit of digital touchup in photoshop - in about 3-5 more hours of effort. I did this one in about three hours (with many breaks) for my #fossilexplainer book:
A scientific diagram in watercolor illustrating differences in preservation from deep to shallow marine settings. Mollusk shells become increasingly disarticulated, worn, and broken, as do vertebrate bones.
A scientific diagram in watercolor showing the relationship between soft v. hard tissues and preservation, using an octopus (no hard parts, only reflected as incredible but rare soft tissue specimens), a belemnoid (rare soft tissue specimens, but the guard fossilizes frequently), and a shelled ammonoid (common ammonite shells)
I have finally gotten back to work on drafting more #fossilexplainer comics for the book - I've been feeling like illustrating key taphonomic concepts. Here's nos. 63 and 64, on preservation bias - soft v. hard tissue preservation, and preservation as it relates to environment 🐡🦖🧪 #sciart
A cartoon showing six different types of traces made by invertebrates on a clam shell, including a snail bore hole, sea urchin scrapes, barnacle attachment scars, octopus boreholes, boring clam drill holes, and a network of eroded burrows from boring sponges
Finally finished this #fossilexplainer comic I started back in June. No. 62 - marine invertebrate borings/traces
A four part comic panel painted in watercolor. Upper left: two clams are freshly dead, with one closed and buried in the sediment; a yellow fish examines the second clam, agape. Upper right: the buried clam ins filled in with a different color sediment - mostly silt. Two brown shark teeth are adjacent. Lower right: the clam mold and the shark teeth have become enriched in phosphate and are now blackened. Lower right: after some erosion, the mold has been eroded out onto the seafloor, along with the shark teeth, into a phosphatic lag deposit. The shell has been lost from the clam mold, which is now a steinkern (internal mold).
Bonus #fossilfriday Valentines Day post: illustration from my future book "Fossil Exlpainer" showing how heart shaped internal molds (steinkerns) form on the inside of cockle and ark clams - here showing Cucullaea. #fossilexplainer #art #sciart 🐡
Four part diagram showing how a steinkern - internal mold of a clam - forms. Top left: a closed clam shell is buried. Top right: As it is buried, the sediment inside the shell becomes rich in phosphorus, and eventually turns into phosphate - becoming a hard, brownish black mold of the shell (bottom left). The shell dissolves, leaving only the mold, and eventually the mold may be eroded out of its original deposit (bottom right).
Many different parts of the normally cartilaginous skeleton of batoids (rays and skates) can fossilize. This diagram shows a stingray and many various types of modified scales, called bucklers: small tooth-like scales with conical, star-shaped, and donut-shaped bases (skates, Rajidae), pillow-shaped bases with smooth triangular scales from the midline (stingray, Dasyatidae), rounded flat bucklers with a small central spine (Dasyatidae), and similar looking oval shaped denticles from the tail (Dasyatidae); also tail spines, like the long serrated tail stingers of stingrays and bat rays (Dasyatidae, Myliobatoidea) and the ridiculous potato-shaped 'roots' of the stingers of manta rays; also, the teeth of stingrays and skates.
How to tell the difference between teeth of the extinct giant shark Carcharocles megalodon and the great white shark, Carcharodon carcharias - after all, some 'meg' teeth are juveniles and no larger than great whites. 'meg' teeth are thicker, have a chevron-shaped scar on the base of the tooth, and fine, regularly sized serrations, as opposed to the larger, but more variably sized serrations of a great white.
When looking for shark teeth, different digging methods yield different results! Many trophy hunters in the southeastern USA just use a shovel and probe fossil-bearing sediment every couple of inches for large teeth, finding only a handful of large trophy specimens such as C. megalodon, mako teeth, and tiger shark teeth (left). However, if you take that sediment and run it through a screen, with the help of flowing water to carry away the sediment, you can find all sorts of tiny teeth representing the bulk of the fossil shark fauna: cat sharks, nurse sharks, whale sharkes, dog sharks, basking sharks, angel sharks, stingrays, skates, and even little dermal denticles. These "micros" are often far more scientifically informative than the big beautiful trophy pieces.
Also for #portfolioday: here's a teaser for a book project I'm working on titled Fossil Explainer - #watercolor diagrams illustrating various concepts in paleontology/earth sciences, targeted towards fossil enthusiasts. I have 50 of these done now. #fossilexplainer #scicomm
