Inside the Collections: Fossil Sharks and Ammonites
[MUSIC PLAYING]
NEIL LANDMAN (Curator, Division of Paleontology): This was a tremendous collection of around 550,000 specimens of marine invertebrates and vertebrates.
Royal Mapes and his wife Gene Mapes, they were professors at Ohio University. And over the last 45 years, they've been collecting fossils.
Most of the fossils they collect are marine fossils in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas. We don't have a good representation of that in our collections already.
Ammonoids belong to the group cephalopods, part of the mollusks. And the cephalopods are distinguished from the clams and the snails in that cephalopods learned how to swim in the water. So when you think of cephalopods, there's octopus, there's squids, there's the pearly nautilus. And the ammonoids are a big part of it. But that group of cephalopods is now extinct. What we see is their beautiful outer shell. But there is a complex internal anatomy, including the jaws.
And in the Mapes collection, there are many specimens that have preserved their jaws inside the shells. It's a very rare occurrence. It takes very unusual circumstances. But it's just perfect for our research. And it lets me understand the behavior and anatomy of ammonoids a lot better.
JOHN MAISEY (Curator, Division of Paleontology): Royal and his wife have an innate ability to collect and find, and collect fossil sharks and other fossil fish in remarkably good preservation in places where nobody else has been able to find them.
These are almost three dimensional. They're not flat and crushed and broken. They're beautifully-preserved fossils that we can then scan, and in the computer, we can extract the skeletal structures in a great deal of detail.
This is a complete head of a little tiny shark. Inside this rock, there's every little piece of all these gill arches, and all the rest of the skeleton. The jaws and other things. Everything's preserved in exquisite detail, but you can only see it by scanning it and processing the scan using computer technology. And that's what we've been doing.
This is one of these fossils from Arkansas, which I think should be renamed Sharkansas, that is so spectacular. Even though it doesn't look like, in scientific terms, it's really significant. It's a major discovery.
It's not just getting a whole bunch of new fossils, but it's what they are, and what they represent that's really important to us.
LANDMAN: You always look to future generations.
I see the value of this collection, and the treasures in this collection, that graduate students in the future, curators in the future, are going to be able to mine this collection for generations to come.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Thanks to a major donation from Ohio University, over 540,000 marine fossils have been added to the Museum's collection. Most of the collection is from the Paleozoic era, and includes both marine invertebrates like ammonites, as well as fossil fish and sharks. In this video, Museum curators Neil Landman and John Maisey talk about the importance of this new addition, and the interesting questions that have arisen from its specimens, like John Maisey’s latest research on the evolution of shark jaws.