dfritschen

On my off time (and years before growing up) I would hike North Central Montana. A very long story short, I accidentally became an expert in seeing/finding loose osteoderm cores; many look very different than what many of us would recognize as fossils, proof of a past life/growth; on some I can see it clearly, but I want various slides and sizes for others to see, too. I can do much of this myself, I believe. I would like to do a project about all this. For starters, I will need a histology slide prepared and a written summary of it, and possibly view other less thin slides and photos. (this in itself will be curious as osteos grow so different from a skeletal bone) This is outside my wheelhouse. I am having trouble finding a partner/lab (or independent) to help me along with this. I’m open to funding other projects as well, to help move this along.

I want to share what took me so very long to learn, all the trials and errors I have put behind me. I am looking for an associate who has lab access and knows their way around it or able to learn.

Osteoderms were/are structures evolutionarily designed to be robust. I believe, in my area, they have endured long after their skeletal hosts succumbed to deep time. I also believe these osteo-cores have preserved even better than teeth. Also, in simple terms, many cores grew like layered/overlapping Klein bottles. That in itself makes for a very durable structure; now add in mineral-rich groundwater, having been soaked up, then ossified solid (this process often destroys much sign of a past life; displaced by crystals, leaving an inverse cast of itself). It’s rare in my area to see a core that isn’t mostly solid and/or chemically polished, some more or less than others.

September 2026