I’ve learned a lot about fossil hunting in the last almost year and a half, but my last trip to an East Texas creek less than an hour from home had me dealing with something I hadn’t been exposed to before: very tiny fossils, properly called microfossils. It was my first hunting trip to a Kincaid Formation spot, and the Kincaid is known for producing micro shark teeth. Sure enough, the matrix I brought home had lots of those teeth. I ended up finding 83 teeth from that trip and the matrix I brought home from it. Most of those teeth were micro teeth. It’s very likely that previous trips have produced very small fossils. In fact, I’m pretty certain I culled some Ptychodus teeth in the past, when they were too small to be recognized for certain by me. But those were exceptions. The majority of my fossils on those trips weren’t too small to be recognized by the naked eye. That’s what made this trip different. Microfossils were the majority of what I found.
I had bought a magnifying lamp some time back. It was mainly for lure making and fishing rod building. But it also works very well when you’re looking for microfossils in matrix. It doesn’t enlarge things enough for you really get a good look at micro teeth, but it at least makes them big enough that you can recognize them as such. Taking photos of microfossils with a smart phone doesn’t accomplish much. Even taking a photo through the magnifying lamp’s magnifying glass still wouldn’t look like much. It took me a couple of days to get through all the matrix from the last trip. But after the first hour of going through it on the first morning, it was obvious that if I intended to enjoy looking at and sharing photographs of most of the fossils from this trip, I would need a setup specifically for that. It was research time.
It didn’t take long to find what I needed: a digital microscope. Digital microscopes are just like regular microscopes, except that instead of looking through an eyepiece to see the magnified object, that object is displayed on a monitor. There are lots of inexpensive digital microscopes that plug into a usb port on a PC, and use that PC’s monitor as a display. And or course, saving that display as a photograph is a basic function of the microscope. This was all a revelation to me. I hadn’t had a microscope in front of me since high school in the 1960. I picked out a digital microscope on Amazon for $39.95, ordered, and it was delivered the very next day.
Installation of the microscope was as simple as assembling and setting up, downloading software to go with it, and plugging it in to the usb port. Once I got a good look at my micro teeth through the microscope, I discovered they needed some cleaning to get rid of pieces of matrix still clinging to them. A soak in a combination of water, hydrogen peroxide, and Calgon water softener did a nice jot of cleaning them. I also found that many of the teeth were broken, and that very few still had the roots. Identifying shark teeth without the root is pretty tough. I probably need to try to be more gentle with removal from the matrix next time to see if I can get more complete teeth. I suspect that many have already lost the roots before leaving the matrix, though. I didn’t get photos of nearly all of the 83 teeth, but I did try to get enough photos to show most tooth shapes of what I’d found. The teeth photograph a little darker than I’d like. I think I need to find a ruler that’s more of a gray color rather than white, to help with that.
Here is the smallest tooth I photographed.
Those lines are millimeters, so this tooth is less than a millimeter wide, and 1 1/2 millimeters long. That is one tiny tooth. It looks like a speck to the naked eye, and is barely recognizeable as a tooth with my magnifying lamp. But in a digital microscope photo, there it is, in all its toothy glory. For those who don’t do metric, a millimeter is just a little more than 1/32 of an inch.
Here is a collection of teeth photos from the trip. The microscope has no zoom; you just have to move it further from the target object to zoom out enough to photograph a larger object. I never moved the microscope for any of these photos, so some of the larger teeth barely fit in the photo.
I especially like these two. They both have all the root. Beautiful micro teeth, indeed.
And here’s a photo of the Ptychodus tooth. It was large enough that I did have to move the microscope back enough to fit it all into the photo.
