Before high definition casts

The world has seen locusts for many, many years. Long before the 8th plague of Egypt, these large juicy insects have been swarming, feasting and surviving for years. Million of years. Hundreds of millions of years. Delicately preserved fossils of these familiar little insects are known from a few sites around the world. Solnhofen, in Germany is one such site.

Solnhofen is more famously known for the discovery of the infamous Archaeopteryx, the feathered reptile that is almost a bird (fun blog post here checking out what the researchers think about Archaeopteryx). As well as the 11 specimens of this beautiful dino-bird, and a feather, the Solnhofen limestones have preserved a huge number of ancient creatures, including, starfish, fish, shrimps, horseshoe crabs, dragonflies, reptiles, pterosaurs, and locusts. (You can see a number of beautiful fossils with incredible detail here.)

150 million years ago, Solnhofen was a little bit different. It was a beautiful lagoon, surrounded by islands. The extremely high salt (or salinity) of the waters meant that life could not live there. There was also no oxygen deeper down, meaning the muds also lacked any life, including worms and bacteria that would normally eat away flesh. Because of the lack of life in this lagoon, any animals (or plants) that fell beneath the waves were slowly covered in fine sediment, and preserved in exquisite detail. The fine feathers of Archaeopteryx and the delicate wings of a locust would be preserved for eternity.

Here is what you have been waiting for, this weeks bad cast. Here she is. I was going to say, ‘She is beautiful’. But I can’t. Because she is not. Not at all. She lacks a dash of colour to brighten her up. She lacks any detail. It could easily be something you may buy for your three year old niece to paint and draw on. But it is a real cast of a fossil. Accessioned with the fossils. Embarrassingly, here it is, our  cast of a 150 million year old locust:

The cast of a fossil locust. Remember, fossil locusts are beautiful, delicate fossils. Something this cast fails to convey.

Such a really, really bad cast. You can kind of see why they did it back in 1906; To show how insects have been around for millions of years, and are (ahem) beautifully preserved. Fossils from Solnhofen should look like this. Unfortunately our cast doesn’t look like one of those.

I am not sure if this, or any other bad cast, has ever been on display. I quite like to think they have, back when the display cases were made of lovely wood, and the dangerously thin glass was so easy to lean on. To have purchased and actually invested in this and other casts, they surely must have been displayed.

I often wonder what people would have thought when they saw such bad casts like this. Would they have squinted to try to ‘see’ what the label says it is? Or would they have even noticed that they were bad? It may be like high definition TV today; we notice if it isn’t HD because we have it. But back when we didn’t have HD, we didn’t complain.

That nipple-toothed beast!

Ooooohh, yeah! It is that time of the week again. And today, you are in for a treat with this bad cast. It is truly a goddarn awful cast. I don’t really know what it looks like; some kind of delicately made chocolate treat? A terrible model of a stalagmite (or could it be a stalactite?)? The bottom looks like honeycomb covered in chocolate, which is delicious. Possibly a chocolate cake horn?

Wrong, wrong, wrong and “what the hell kind of birthday party did you go to” wrong.

 

Go on! Try and guess what it is without reading on! If you get it right, then this cast deserves to be taken out of the ‘Bad Cast’ series!

This is a cast of a really amazing creature; the tooth of an extinct amphibian called Mastodonsaurus jaegeri. You will have to take my word for it , because it took me a looooooong time to ‘see’ it. (I did have a little advantage, as the name was written on the old accession card – a rare treat to have some information!!).

The name of the Genus, Mastodonsaurus, means ‘nipple-tooth lizards’. Now, I’m no expert on human anatomy, but I would like to think I am familiar with certain areas. I am sure things were not that different 190 years ago than today, because that is one odd shaped nipple. I’m sure Mr Holl, who named it in 1828, had his own playful reasons.

This terrible cast hides a wonderful story. The teeth may have looked (to some) like nipples, but they were no lizards. These were enormous amphibians which were dipping and diving in the swampy waters around 240 million years ago, during the Tirassic Period. Amphibians are a group of animals that share common features. For example frogs and newts are amphibians, and spend most of their lives in the water, having slimy skin to keep them moist if they venture out on land. Eggs are laid in water and the young will spend their lives swimming in the water; it is only when they are adults when they can use the land.

The tooth is massive, over 20 centimetres long in a head which was 1.2 meters long, the same length as a Tyrannosaurus rex head! The full length of the entire animal varied, but some of the largest specimens discovered so far could be as long as an African elephant (around 6 metres long). That is one mother of an amphibian!

This was like no other amphibian you know today. Frogs are fruit-flies compared to this creature! It belonged to an extinct group of animals called ‘Temnospondyls’ (say: tem – nos – pond – di – lis) – lets call them ‘Temnys’ (say: Tem – knees). Much bigger than amphibians around today, Temnys looked a little like a terrifying cross between a crocodile and a salamander. One feature uniting all Temnys is the triangle shaped skull. They also had very small arms and legs, with four toes on the arms, and five toes on the legs.

A lovely old artist interpretation of Mastodonsaurus (the creature with it’s head raised). This picture was drawn a while ago, and palaeontologists now believe that the Mastodonsaurus would have lived almost permanently in the water. (Image from wiki)

It was an amazing animal. Its eyes were mid-way down its head, on the top; so the body could be below the water surface. The huge mouth was packed full of peg-like teeth. And this is where our terrible cast comes in. On the bottom jaw, were two large teeth, bigger than the others, which slotted through holes in the top jaw. These could have been for grabbing prey, as these big beasts were predators. Although a difference between sexes (called sexual dimorphism) hasn’t been noticed yet, these could be in males and used for fighting during the mating season.

For such enormous amphibians, what would they have eaten? We can look at clues in other animals. Today dolphins have peg like teeth which they use for catching fish; there would have been plenty of succulent fish living in the swamps. There is evidence of them attacking land animals, probably through ambush; some smaller Temny fossils have tooth marks on them made by these nipple-toothed beasts.

What a creature! An enormous salamander-crocodile-newt thing! This animal lived 240 million years ago and had cousins which it ate, and others which were bigger than he was! Fossils bring to life the awesomeness of these extinct animals. It is a bit of a shame that this terrible cast doesn’t.

A terrible cast of an awesome extinct shark

This isn’t a trilobite. It’s not a marshmallow. Read on to discover how amazing this bad cast really is!

Do not fear. I’m not tricking you! This isn’t a lump of your finest Plaster of Paris. This is a cast of a real fossil. Sweet goodness me, this is one mother of a bad cast.

The nearest thing this looks like that could be a fossil is a scallop shell. In fact, it belongs to a creature that would have fed on scallops for lunch.

Some of you may have recognised that this is a cast of a very old type of shark tooth. Dont worry if you didn’t. I didn’t until I read the old label. It was purchased on April 10^th 1901. (Yes – this cast has some information with it!). The card also says “plaster cast of tooth (white)”. I’m pleased they wrote that extra bit of useful information on the old label. I wouldnt have known otherwise.

I still do really wonder why some of these casts in museum collections were never painted. (Mind you, as we have seen, the ones that were are bloody awfully painted!)

There was a little more information on the label. The tooth is from an ancient shark called Ptychodus, and it says from the Cretaceous Period of Kent. That’s quite a lot of information for this terrible cast. It is actually a bizarre tooth that you wouldn’t think of as a shark (click here for nice images of real fossils!).

This somewhat modest cast hides a much more exciting history of this strange animal. Ptychodus is an Genus of shell crushing sharks, which are all now extinct. Yes. Shell crushing. Not all sharks were ferocious hunters who prey on surfers, or run down old fishing boats with three drunk men singing ‘Show me the way to go home’. Good times.

Sharks are cool creatures. There are over 400 species of sharks in the waters today, and there were some incredible ones which have lived in the past. They are the epitome of the perfect predator. Their stealth, their terrifying teeth and jaws, and apparent ruthlessness sums them up for many people, and will account for our unreasonable fear of these majestical animals. Sharks have their origins a long, long time ago, during the Silurian Period (around 420 million years ago). Since then, they have evolved into massive predators, such as the enormous and infamous Carcharodon megalodon (popularly known as Megalodon) to strange species that swam around eating and crushing shells.

The owner of this beautiful cast was swimming around in the waters while Tyrannosaurus rex was stomping around on land with his colourful feathers trying to woo a mate. There were quite a few different species of Ptychodus sharks, (A lot of lovely information about the different species can be found here.)

This was a big shark. It could grow as long as two Black Cabs (around 10m long!). It is more than likely that this shark stayed along the coast line where it could easily find shellfish in the shallow depths. It’s enormous, ribbed teeth would have ground up a scallop or an oyster with ease!

There is no evidence it ate vertebrates (animals with backbones). But there were bigger things in the seas during the Cretaceous Period (145-65million years ago), including the large mosasaurs, and the fast and elegant ichthyosaurs. These marine reptiles may have fed on these shell loving sharks.

This cast doesn’t really give us much to look at. It doesn’t jump out and tell you what it is. It’s a strange ball of plaster, with a couple of ribs on the top. It is amazing to think, that it was cast from a real fossil tooth. An extinct shell crushing shark tooth! Pretty awesome! Just a shame the cast is so darn bad.