Custom Fossil Shark Tooth Display Project

Wow it feels like I haven’t done a project post in so long! I thought this little fossil display day project came out pretty cool, though, and I thought it would be interesting to show how it came together!

First step is obviously to collect some fossil specimens to mount! To find these teeth I took a little weekend trip out to the Big Brook streams in Jersey, and spent 5 or 6 hours crawling in the gravel and sifting through sand under a pretty steady rain…in 40 degree weather (which I’ll admit wasn’t a lot more glamorous than it sounds), but hey, we had the place to ourselves at least!
I had a blast I can’t even deny it haha

I found a few fossil shark teeth and some pretty decent belemnites (the amber colored cylinders), as well as some other small assorted fossils at the first site we collected at. (Some highlights being crab claw fragments, a skull fragment, a partial fossilized seed pod.)

At the second site I found a few more belemnites (which are the internal shells of extinct squid like animal), but a lot more of what we’re here for in this post, and that’s fossil shark teeth!
I found a lot more of these at the second site we tried, and I found some really exciting complete ones that inspired me to display them.

I also have to show this one off! It’s one of the more unusual finds I picked up. It’s a fossilized shark vertebrae!

After getting everything cleaned up my next task was sorting these out and categorizing them a bit!

I’m not super confident in my identification skills but I got out my guides and did my best!
The bottom pile is comprised of partial teeth that either couldn’t be ID’d or just didn’t make the cut on being visually pleasing haha

After sorting I did a bit of work laying them out in a visually pleasing way. I could have done this in the computer but tbh this is more tactile and faster for me anyway.

I took some (reasonably) evenly lit and perspective-free photos once everything was sorted, and made sure to give myself some scales and parallels that would be important later!

I pulled these photos into photoshop, chose the best one, and then did some lens adjusting to remove the barrel distortion of my camera. The telephoto I used is better than a standard wide lens at cutting distortion, but any that remained, regardless of how subtle, would affect the profile shape of the teeth, and with a cutting project this scale that can lead to super subtle improper fit in spots, and nothing is worse!

I adjusted that distortion-free image’s levels and contrast to really bump the silhouettes of the teeth, and did some minor cleanup to remove dust specs and artifacts. I pulled it into Rhinoceros 5 next, and used the orient command to very precisely scale it and export it, so when I imported it into illustrator in the next step it was already perfectly sized.

I used image trace to get precise vectors of the teeth profiles, and added a .75mm offset to each profile so the teeth wouldn’t be too tight a fit. I also adjusted my layout a bit just to get some proper spacing after the offset (so the acrylic won’t be to thin anywhere), and to tighten up the precision and alignment on some of the teeth. I added a little label in the center, and an outline profile with screw holes that fit M3 hardware.

I took these vectors to the laser cutter and got to cutting! This is always a fun step.

Finishing the profile cut.

Heres what the first prototype looked like after cutting! (Yes I knowwww, I vacuumed out all that mess after I cut this haha)

I loved the way this looked, and at this point I was actually getting more optimistic that all of my software hopping and photo adjusting had somehow resulted in some nice profiles.

I dropped the teeth in as a test, and heck yeah! A really nice fit!

There was one issue, however. This offset was WAY too big. I wanted to shoot for bigger and work down, tho, cause it’s much easier to measure the offset with the tooth inside the profile like this.

I’m no newbie to adjusting offsets cause I swear that’s 99% of engineering parts that fit with laser cutting and also with 3D printing lol. Even so I was pleasantly surprised that my second test was perfect! (Notice I didn’t cut the ENTIRE plate as a test this time….probably shoulda done that in the first place but sometimes I get a little cocky haha)

Version two was the most satisfying thing to put together, dropping these teeth into perfectly snug little pockets was too fun.

Some of you may have already been wondering, “what about the bigger teeth? Aren’t they thicker?” And yes! So my plan was to just add a second layer in the stack that allowed for deeper pockets.

I pulled that scrap piece of acrylic gently across the teeth in the v2 cutout to test which ones protruded above the first acrylic sheet. I marked those on a legend and then stacked the v1 cut on top and ran the same test to make sure that no teeth were too thick for even the double layer.

Using that legend, I cut out a second holder plate with only the deeper teeth cut out, as well as a top and bottom solid plate with only hardware holes.
Notice I also added some center screw holes, which keep the center of the display from bowing out.

Now all there was to do was assembling the stack! Notice there’s one tooth that didn’t make the cut. It was the only one too thick for 2 layers so I decided to leave it out.

I cut out the label I created to drop in between the last 2 plates.

And after aligning it as best as I could, I dropped the top plate on, and put some screws in place!

I peeled off the protective film on the top and bottom and bam! One custom-fit display for my shark teeth that allows me to view them clearly from both sides!

On a white bg for some better contrast, cause who doesn’t like extra glamour shots!

And one with my hand for some scale! (If the literal tape measure earlier wasn’t enough haha)

I couldn’t be happier with this display! Only thing I’d do differently the next time is to make the label double-sided! That’s easy enough to fix tho.

If you’ve made it this far, I gotta say thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end! I hope you had as much fun learning about how I put this project together as I did sharing my process!