Lexington Limestone Microfossils

These microfossils were found in the Lexington Limestone of Franklin County, Kentucky. They existed in the Ordovician Period. This first fossil is a snail or gastropod. It appears to be composed of some sort of black material.  All fossils are about 1 mm in length. A microscope was used to magnify 40x.

I tried something new to help produce an in focused image of these 3-D fossils when using a microscope.  The idea was to take a series of images with the microscope of one part of the fossil in focus.  After taking a series of 4-6 images, put them in a program like Registax to stack the in focus parts together.  Well, the plan hit some snags due to my process.  First, I was using a handheld camera so the fossil was in slightly different place in each file.  The fossil was too big for target box to follow in Registax.  The program was designed to be used with astronomy images taken with the telescope so a 16x16 or 64x64 pixel area can be tracked when it is planet or crater size in the image.  Needless to say the stacked image was some what blurry.

I then tried using Photoshop to align and stack the images.  The program was geared to work with larger images.  The microfossils images were cropped to about 700x700 pixels and were aligned.  I then realized that even though the microscope had been set to focus on a different area of the 3-D fossil the camera I was using seemed to being focusing on the same area of the fossil each time.  So all my images pretty much look the same thus rendering the stacking ineffective!  I will try this experiment again at a later date and with a fixed mounted microscope camera.

This fossil might be a crinoid stem fragment.

 

Thanks to an identification by blog visitor Solius.  This is a "Hyolithos; an enigmatic creature that some propose are mollusks."

 

Microfossil Crinoid Spines?

These microfossils were found in the Lexington Limestone in Franklin County, Kentucky. They appear to be some sort of spines maybe belonging to a crinoid.  Magnification was set to 40x.  Fossils are from the Ordovician Period.

 

  

 

Lexington Limestone Scolecodonts

 

My cousin loaned me a Orion MicroXplore MFL-06 since my digital microscope broke.  It has a 4x objective lens with a 10x eyepiece lens.  I used a Kodak LS743 compact camera in macro mode to take images though the eyepiece.  Using Photoshop CS4 processed the images to show on the blog.  I took one shot of a mm scale on a ruler to get a rough idea of scale.  I then used the Photoshop Analysis tool to set a pixel value for 1 mm for the Ruler Tool.  This tool was then used to measure points on some scolecodont fossils.

  

 These fossil remains of an Ordovician Period polychaete annelid worm.  Fossils found in the Lexington Limestone of Franklin County, Kentucky.  Thanks to Herb for the material to study.

  Below is an image to give the reader a perspective as to the size of these fossils and why a microscope is needed to study them.  All the fossils for this post are on that business card.

 

  

  

  

  

  

These last two images I am not sure about.  They might be scolecodont fragments.