Prepping a mystery 12 million year old fossil bone block I found on a beach (Maker's Challenge)

Thanks Theo for organising the Maker’s Challenge again! I found this mystery bone cluster on one of my local beaches a while back. I’m feeling more confident in the acid prepping so I decided to start prepping this really cool fossil. I could see there were a number of bones in the block and they seemed to pretty well preserved, not too much bio erosion.

An air scribe was used to remove the majority of the rock, but because the rock was so sticky, I used some acetic acid to remove the final layer of rock on the bones.

I would put the fossil in the acetic acid for 12 hours and then in fresh water , that I changed a couple of times, for 24 hours at least.

There appears to be a triangular hole in the one vertebra which could perhaps be feeding damage from something like a shark!

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The 3D model of the dolphin vertebrae is from NZFauna on Sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/nzfauna

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