This is the "Fossil Friday" post #46. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world!
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This week, we have an absolutely stunning specimen of Elonichthys peltigerus, which is a species of fish from the Mazon Creek biota. As you may have guessed, it's pretty rare, especially in this condition... have a look at the detail of those scales! This fossil was discovered by Peter Kruty many years ago in the Pit 11 locality. Peter and his family were big fossil collectors from the 1950's until around 2000. His father Sam Kruty was a co-author on two of the papers in the "Richardson's Guide to the Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek" by Charles Shabica. In that book, Gordon C. Baird and John L. Anderson have a paper called "Relative Abundance of Different Mazon Creek Organisms" in which they detail the occurrence of various fauna fossils. They found 66 fish in the 287,000 concretions they sampled.
The Krutys recently made a generous donation of fossil material to ESCONI and we will post more details soon. Thank you, Peter and Paul! That is one stunning fish!
