Friday, March 12, 2010

French Eocene Fossils

 These Middle Eocene Epoch (Lutetian Stage of the Palaeogene Period, Cenozoic Era) fossils just arrived so the images were quickly taken with the microscope using 40x magnification.  Since they are relatively three dimensional some of the images are partially out of focus.

A website link is below that can be used to help identify them.  The site is comprehensive with a lot of gastropods that will take a while to look through to match what fossil is what.

Fossils are from Fleury-la-Rivière which is located in the French region of Marne, southwest of Reims and northwest of Epernay.

This French fossil website is an amazing piece of website development and paleontological data that was written at least 5 years ago.  The PHP/SQL search method is nice that allows visual sorting on 1543 stored specimens.



Thanks to Michael Hesemann of http://www.foraminifera.eu for these specimens.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice!

Some of those gastropods look very familiar--I just looked through a bunch of tiny Eocene molluscs from the Isle of Wight (England) that a friend brought back last fall. This excellent website: http://www.dmap.co.uk/fossils/ was a big help. Many are probably the same species as your French specimens.

Cheers,
--Howard (Calgary, Canada)

Michael Popp said...

Thanks for the link. I can see why that site got an award. The photography is very sharp with the author choosing a black background. It would be nice if the pictures were of higher resolution but I am guessing since there are so many, server storage could be an issue.

The fossils I am working with are maybe 1 mm and were magnified 40x.

Have you tried to photograph any of the molluscs you received?