The Last stormy Day of April

The weather lately has been uncooperative to plan anything outdoors, so I decided to take a fishing trip inside. I went through my storage boxes and caught this small string of fosil fish. It is always fun looking through the fish needing preparation. the ones needing little preparation are the easy catches, they are the first to go to the preparation table.

This pair of Knightia took my eye. They will look nice in a verticle or horizontal display.

                                                         I found another pair of small Knightia that seem to be traveling together.

After catching a few Knightia I decided it was time to catch a few Diplomytus. I land three of these delicate beauties.

WOW! What a guy has to do to get in a spring fishing trip

April Ray

A change of pace is always good and a new challenge brings a high level of activity to our mental and physical being. A spring begins to materialize with longer days, a few lingering snow storms, our song birds returning I decided to challenge myself by working on sting ray plates.After going through my boxes of projects  accumulated over the past two seasons I found three possibilities.I chose the ray that would take the most restoration as my first project. This ray needed a great deal of help.
The ray's disk is @ 7 inches in diameter. It is the peel of another project I will bring to life later. In the peel process I ended up with only about half of the ray. So I reconstructed the left side and most of the tail. In the reconstruction of the tail I decides to make it a fat tailed ray. Heliobatis radian was inlaid into a nice banded matrix with a small Knightia  present on the matrix rock. I chose to inlay the ray going the opposite direction of the Knightia. The balance allows a lot of flexibility on how this sample will be displayed. it shows nicely horizontally or vertically.

The overall dimension of the plate is 12 inches wide and 21.5 inches long.