French Oysters, Aged to Perfection

Wooster, Ohio — After our glorious fieldwork in France earlier this month, the Campanian (Upper Cretaceous) oysters Macy Conrad (’18), Paul Taylor (Natural History Museum, London), and I collected are now in our cozy Wooster Paleontology Lab. Now the less glamorous work begins: washing, sorting and labeling the specimens. Macy is shown at work with the collection arranged by localities.

This part of the work requires very low-tech equipment: scissors, paper, and water-soluble white glue. Generations of Wooster students know this procedure. Every specimen must be labelled with a number indicating its locality, even if we have hundreds of them.

Paleontologists worry a lot about losing the context of a specimen, so we are obsessive about labelling. First we give a C/W code to each locality, print the numbers by the hundreds, cut them out, and then glue them to appropriate places on each fossil. White glue is great because it is easy to use, non-toxic, and it dissolves in water in case we need to remove or change a label. I learned this simple process in graduate school.

Here are some fossil oysters with our coding sheet above.

A close-up of labeled specimens. We place the labels on matrix stuck to the fossil if possible.

These are the customized tags we’ll eventually fill out for each specimen recording our observations of the sclerobionts (hard-substrate dwellers like encrusters and borings). This will keep Macy and me busy for a long time. It’s not dramatic work, but we thought you might like to see all aspects of paleontological research through this project.

More to come!