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ORTON GEOLOGICAL MUSEUM

Orton Geological Museum

The Orton Geological Museum is administered within the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA. It maintains a large collection of fossils, rocks, minerals, meteorites, and building stones, many of them of historic as well as scientific importance.
Figure 1. Cladoselache fyleri, a chondrichthyan fossil preserved at an early stage of decay and disarticulation in an iron-carbonate concretion, collected by William Kepler between 1880 and 1886 from the Cleveland Shale Member of the Ohio Shale (Upper Devonian), Cleveland, Ohio, USA (above), and an interpretive sketch of the specimen (below). The cartilaginous bones of the skull, including the jaws, have largely disarticulated, and some of the tiny teeth are scattered nearby. The body was twisted just behind the pectoral fin, so the fossil appears in left-lateral view at the front, and in oblique-ventral view through most of the trunk and tail regions. A distinct rounded line surrounding the fish represents the margin of the microbial biofilm, or “decay halo,” that was responsible for early decay and also forming the concretion and preserving the fish remains. The fossil is 50 cm in length. This previously undescribed specimen was one of many surprises in the 19th-century geological collection of Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, Ohio.

Cladoselache, a puzzling ancient shark-like fish

Loren E. Babcock, Professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University, introduces research on Cladoselache, a puzzling ancient shark-like fish.
Reconstructed skeleton of a 2.1-m-tall giant ground sloth, Megalonyx jeffersonii from Holmes County, Ohio, US, mounted in 1896 (A); a 25-cm-long claw core from the right rear foot (B); and detail of the upper part of the right femur showing slices presumably made using a flint knife by a North American Palaeo-Indian approximately 13,100 years ago (C).

A gentle giant: Thomas Jefferson’s ground sloth

Professor Loren E. Babcock and Dr H. Gregory McDonald discuss the historical significance of palaeontology, focusing on key figures’ contributions to the field and their studies of the ground sloth, Megalonyx.

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