Mamlambo, an amateur fossil hunter from Christchurch, New Zealand discovers some very rare and extremely large fossil shark vertebrae.

They are 12cm in diameter and covered in rock. He uses an air scribe (like a small pneumatic hammer) to slowly reveal the shark fossils.

To stabilize the fossils and prevent them from further deteriorating, he uses the B72 as a consolidant. The cracks in the rock are most like caused by the rock drying out and shrinking.

The vertebrae are aged based on the rock layer in which they are found which in this case is Paleocene or Cretaceous. It's difficult to tell as the layers are stacked on top of each other and the fossil had fallen out of the cliff.

It took around 10 hours to fully reveal the fossils. They are too fragile to remove from the rock completely. The rock is holding them together at this point.

At the end of the video, he shows smaller shark vertebrae that has been completely removed from the host rock to see what these would look like inside there.

Mamlambo, an amateur fossil hunter from New Zealand, discovers some very rare and extremely large fossil shark vertebrae. They are 12cm in diameter and covered in rock. He uses an air scribe (like a small pneumatic hammer) to slowly reveal the shark fossils. To stabilise the fossils and prevent them from further deteriorating, he uses B72 paraloid as a consolidant. The cracks in the rock are most like caused by the rock drying out and shrinking.

The vertebrae are aged based on the rock layer in which they are found which in this case is Paleocene or Cretaceous. It's difficult to tell as the layers are stacked on top of each other and the fossil had fallen out of the cliff.

It took around 10 hours to fully reveal the fossils. They are too fragile to remove from the rock completely. The rock is holding them together at this point.

At the end of the video, I show a smaller shark vertebrae that has been completely removed from the host rock to see what these would look like inside there.