Grandicrepidula princeps, the Princess Slipper snail.

 

Good morning from Pacific Paleontology.  Here’s a recent 3-D scan we made of a fossil giant Grandicrepidula princeps, the Princess Slipper snail.  3D scanning has gotten a lot easier today, and we made this one with a simple app for iPhone called Photo Catch.  It took about 2 minutes to create from video and the app also has a Mac Desktop version and we use it frequently for these projects.  And even though I say the worms are parasites in the video, I'm not sure they actually caused the snail any harm; they may thus just be commensal as well.  Enjoy.

Screen washing sediments for macro- and micro-fossils

The end of our screen washing season is drawing to a close here at Pacific Paleontology with the approaching Winter rains here in Santa Cruz.  This is one of the Pliocene 4-5 million year old samples that we are running through our screen processing this week.