PLAIN- LANGUAGE SUMMARY

Reproducing tiny fossils, with examples from early jawless vertebrates

Because of their small size, taking high quality pictures of microfossils can be difficult. Methods and equipment that overcome many of these difficulties are now available to most palaeontological researchers, but there are still circumstances where these methods cannot be used, and in such cases techniques involving fossil replication offer an alternative. In this article I describe simple and inexpensive methods for moulding and casting microfossils (or microscopic details of larger fossils) using widely available silicon rubber and epoxy resin. I also provide simple instructions for using digital image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop® to make images of microfossils that when viewed using glasses with red and green lenses (or red and blue) appear three-dimensional. These methods are illustrated with examples from research on conodonts and other fossil jawless vertebrates.