Last Wednesday, Hemet resident Jeanette Hughes visited the Western Science Center to donate a box of Cretaceous invertebrate fossils that she and her late husband Richard collected more than a decade ago in Texas.Most of the specimens in the donation were ammonites, extinct cephalopods related to the modern chambered nautilus:
There were also several sea biscuits, a type of echinoid related to sand dollars:
A number of species of bivalve mollusks were represented, including oysters from the genus Gryphaea (or a close relative):
One of the oysters is impressively large (note the 10 cm scale bar):
Jeanette was able to provide us with pretty precise locality information for these specimens, making them potentially much more useful from a scientific standpoint. WSC did not have much of material from these taxa or from this time period, so this is a nice addition to our collection. I'd like to thank Jeanette for her kind donation.