I head off to one of my local beaches to have a look and see if some recent big swells had expose any new fossils. Looks like the swells had deposited more sand than it took away so I had to work hard for the fossils I found!

I was inspecting a section ancient seafloor that used to be around 300m deep in the mid-Miocene (~12 million years old) when I spotted something interesting sticking out of the cliff. I suspected it could be a tooth and wanted to remove it so I could take it to our local museum. Before starting to work on it, I coated it in some paraloid B72 to consolidate it as fossils this old can have invisible cracks in them causing them to fall apart when you touch them.

I carefully chipped around it and then lifted it out without touching the fossil itself. I GPS tagged the exact location it was found as this will be useful to build up a picture of the area over the years as more fossils are found.

Back home, I used plain old tap water and a toothpick to remove the siltstone from the fossil revealing an extremely sharp and rare shark tooth from a species of cat shark - Megascyliorhinus cooperi.

I used my microscope at 6x magnification to take some close-up photos of it with the scale in mm next to it.

I take my new lapidary saw out for a spin and cut a couple of rocks, it's very satisfying seeing them emerge like that that. Next I need to get into polishing them!

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