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New Scanner

Last weekend we bought a Microtek 4900 scanner, because we were interested in scanning our old slide collection and storing them on CD. With 2400 ppi optical resolution, it does a great job at that.

Of course, I had to try scanning some of my fossils, and the results were amazing. I had been thinking about getting a microscope to study smaller fossils, but it looks like I won't need one. The first fossils I scanned were a few dozen tiny fossils I described in June 2000 (see tiny fossil page).

The image below has been scaled to 50%, and the original TIFF was compressed to JPEG, so it isn't even the full resolution. The colors and dynamic range were perfect, and needed no tuning at all. The picture shows many pharyngeal teeth, tiny shark teeth and other fish teeth. The largest teeth in the picture are less than 2.5mm (millimeter!, 1/10") long, the smallest less than 0.5mm....

tiny teeth

Just to show how tiny these are:

tiny teeth

Next I scanned this Galeocerdo aduncus (scaled to 40%):

big tiger

Here is a detail at original resolution, but compressed to (high quality) JPEG:

big tiger

Here is a nice cowshark (40%):

big cow

As you can guess from this page, I'm thrilled! All this for less than $120,-


Last modified: August 31, 2002 - © Edwin Huizinga