Information on some of the unique and beautiful fossils used for jewelry making.

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    The fossils discussed here range from five hundred to five hundred million years old, and are found all over the world.  These are not the only suitable fossils for jewelry making, other fossils available are the various bones and teeth of dinosaurs, ancient sharks and the fossil remains of plants.  The fossils that are covered here are: fossilized walrus tusk, ancient mammoth tusk, amber, trilobites, orthoceras, ammonites and ammolites.

     Ancient fossil ivory is any type of ivory that is over five hundred years old and possibly more than a million years old.  This is the only ivory that we use due to the destruction of life required for attaining fresh ivory.  The ancient ivory used in most jewelry production is one of two types either fossilized walrus or mammoth tusk.

Fossil walrus ivories are primarily found on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska and up and down the mainland Alaskan coast.  Some of the fossil weathers out of the ground on its own, however the majority of it is excavated by Eskimos from their Ancestral village sites.  The ancient Eskimos often carved walrus tusks to use as ice axes, spear or harpoon tips, fire starters, sled runners, or decorative pieces such as jewelry and figurines.  We primarily use the pieces that were left over after the above mentioned tools were created. The amazing colors found in ancient walrus ivories are caused by the minerals in the surrounding soil: the browns and oranges by iron and manganese, greens and blues by copper and the rare reds by gold.  The USGS has reported that a piece of walrus tusk that they carbon dated was thirty thousand years old, however most fossil walrus ivory is between five hundred and three thousand years old and rarely exceeds ten thousand years old.

Ancient Fossilized/Mineralized Mammoth Tusk.  Mammoth Ivory is found as a consequence of gold mining, mostly in Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. In Siberia it is mined for its own sake, often found in deposits after violent winter storms have revealed a portion of the material sticking up from the perma frost near ancient lake beds, and it's further excavated from there, where it as been a resource for centuries. The Russians have been industrious in developing a world market for their ivories.... the US, and Canada lag far behind.  Proboscidian ivory is identified by the grain pattern visible in its cross section.  These patterns are formed by a series of spirals running clockwise and counter clockwise over one another.  This pattern resembles a star, when this star's points have obtuse angles the ivory is mammoth or mastodon, if the points were acute angles the ivory would be from modern elephants.  Coloration occurs from the same minerals that affect walrus ivory.  All mammoth ivory is pre Ice-age, 10,000 to possibly a million years old, except for a single herd of pygmy mammoth that died out around 3000 years ago on an isolated Siberian island.

Amber is tree resin that has fossilized over several million years; younger tree resin that has hardened recently is called copal.  The species of trees that produced amber included cedars/conifers and some broadleaved trees, and are now extinct.  Many of the insects, leaves, flowers, and small animals that have been found in amber are not only extinct they also still have some of their DNA intact.  In an amber bed in New Jersey over 100 unknown and extinct species of Cretaceous were found some over 93 million years old.  Amber has been used in jewelry since the Bronze Age (2500-500 BC); and can be found ranging from transparent to cloudy, in hues of yellow, green, blue and red.

Trilobites were marine invertebrates that ranged in size from less than 1/4 inch (0.6 cm) to over 2 feet (0.6 m) long, they are among the earliest of known arthropods.  They evolved over 500 million years ago (the Paleozoic Era), and went extinct 248 million years ago (the late Permian period).  Trilobites were very common and very diverse; over 15,000 species of trilobites are known.  The different trilobite species probably had different diets; some were herbivores (eating plants), some were detrivores (eating decayed material) and some were scavengers (eating carrion).  Some trilobites crawled along the sea floor, some swam, and others drifted with ocean currents.  Many trilobites had protective spines.  Some could roll up into a ball, and some could burrow into the sea floor.  However it is thought that the evolution of jawed fish in the oceans may have contributed to the decline of the trilobites, which are not seen as having effective protection against predation. 

Orthoceras were among the most advanced of the invertebrates having eyes, jaws and a sophisticated nervous system.  They are members of the cephalopod class similar to nautilus, squid and octopus.  Now extinct, the Orthoceras meaning "straight horn" thrived about 345 - 395 million years ago (the Devonian age).  They swam freely using a jet propulsion system by squirting water from their bodies. They had tentacles and ink sacs much like the present-day squid. As they died, their shells sank to the sea floor where they were aligned by currents, buried by sediments, and over the ages transformed into the fossils we use today.

Ammonites are extinct members of the Cephalopod class, and vary in size from as large as 1.7 m (5.6 ft) in diameter, to as small as 2 cm (0.75 in) in diameter.  The name "ammonite" is derived from the ancient Egyptian god Ammon, who considered them to be divine. He is represented by the head of a ram with twisted spiral horns, reminiscent of the twisted shells of the ammonite.  Ammonites thrived from around 435 million years ago (the Silurian period), and were widespread and abundant up in till about 65 million years ago (the Cretaceous period).  During the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, ammonites evolved more streamlined shells for swimming and the structure of their shells became stronger. Different shell shapes also emerged, such as snail-like or uncoiled. 

An ammolite is an ammonoid that over millions and millions of years and through contact with various minerals obtained a rainbow hue.  In 1981, the International Commission for Colored Stones accepted ammolite as an organic precious stone.  The difference between an ammonite and an ammolite is all in the shell; ammolites have a three layer shell, the middle is formed from small plates that overlap and are held together by an organic substance called conchiolin (this layer is the same for both ammonites and ammolites). The upper and lower layers in an ammolite shell are composed of columnar micro crystals of aragonite (a calcium carbonate of low stability).  In ammonite the aragonite has transformed over millions of years into calcite (a stable calcium carbonate) and the rainbow hue has been replaced by less iridescent colors.

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