Monday, October 28, 2013

The Story of the World's Favorite Fossil



Here is a YouTube video from the SciShow channel. It claims that the Orthoceras cephalopod is the world's favorite fossil. They are showing a polished one from Morocco. Oddly enough, with all the fossils I have photographed on this blog, I have not photographed a Moroccan one. I guess they are the favorite because Moroccan fossil dealers extract and polish so many to sell worldwide. One can see them for sale at fossil shows and museum gift shops.

They publish videos on science news, history, and concepts. With over a million subscribers and almost 100 million total views, they have quite a viewing audience! As of this writing they have published 365 videos.

The video highlighted in this blog post has been downloaded almost 360,000 times as of this writing. That is really good for something about a fossil that does not relate to a dinosaur or the evolution debate. In a creative way to raise money for the SciShow video operation they sold 20 signed Orthoceras fossils for $50 each. They sold out according to this web site: https://subbable.com/scishow.  Here is their pledge video, wow just like PBS and NPR do. :) I wish them the best.