BEDFORD MUSEUM
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Jurassic Fish

The specimen is of a type of fish called Lepidotes that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.  The museum’s specimen comes from the middle Jurassic and is about 155 million years old.  It was found many years ago at one of the brickpits in Peterborough and after preparation at the Natural History Museum in London became part of the collection of the London Brick company.  It was placed on display at the company’s headquarters at Stewartby in Bedfordshire finally becoming the Property of Hanson UK when they took over London Brick in 1984.  Hanson Brick kindly donated the specimen to Bedford Museum so it could be seen by a wider audience.

Sadly over the years the specimen had cracked slightly due to movement of the shale matrix underneath.  The back of the head was particularly badly cracked.  Geology conservator Nigel Larkin agreed to take on the task of repairing these cracks and aided by his wife to sculpt in the missing sections of the fish.  The finished product gives a good idea of how the living fish would have looked.

Pieces of Lepidotes can be found reasonably easily in the Oxford Clay of the brickpits around Bedford.  Normally however you only find single shiny diamond shaped scales.  It is rare to find a section of a fish as big as the one shown above.  When a fish dies it is normally eaten by scavengers or disturbed by water currents.  To be in a museum it must have escaped this fate and avoided being broken up by the draglines and bulldozers used to excavate and move the clay.  Finally it needs to be spotted by someone with the interest and knowledge to collect and preserve it.

Please click on the thumbnail to view larger image
	Fish prior to any work.  You can easily see the missing parts and the large crack.
	Detail of the cracking damage to the back of the head.
	Sculpting work being carried out to restore the missing parts of the fish.  The artificial parts have been coloured so they can easily be differentiated from the real fossil, but they do make the fossil much easier to interpret.
	The finished result

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