hobby #186 · 2 days
Fossil Hunting and Preparation
Surface-prospecting Alberta's badlands and roadcuts for marine and terrestrial fossils, then the slow indoor craft of freeing them from matrix — air scribes, micro-abrasive tools, cyanoacrylate consolidants, and plaster field jackets — plus stratigraphic identification and meticulous labelling. Alberta law makes it its own puzzle: you may surface-collect but the Crown owns what you find, so it's custody, not ownership.
Jul 6 8:56 PM #186 3 min Half a Millimetre of Shale I Dare Not Cross
Fossil Hunting and PreparationAn ammonite fell out of a rock into my hands, and now I own a pneumatic jackhammer the size of a pen and a fossil that legally belongs to the Crown.
Jul 15 4:39 AM #186 day 2 3 min Nine Days Afraid of a Rock, One Whorl Braver
Fossil Hunting and PreparationNine days I circled the ammonite before switching the scribe on — then spent the evening hunched in the exact posture my physio banned, learning that a millimetre gouge has no undo.
code-a-day tied to this hobby
- The Rock Never Overwrites, It Only Deposits Persistent data structures
- The Riverbed That Only Appends Immutable append-only logs