Down by the Bay With a Microscope Snob

 We made our first trip of the year down to the Chesapeake Bay to look for shark teeth!

We were there about an hour and came back with 107 Miocene fossils!

We had 16 bone fragments from marine mammals, 14 ray plates and 77 shark teeth!

Choclo was very impressed when I explained that the Egyptian mummies are 3000 years old, but the shark teeth are 30,000 times that old!

Plus, we had a lovely day at the beach and a nice picnic!

When we got home, I hauled out our brand new (university surplus) microscope (Thank you Mr. Bill!!!) to look at the sample of Bay water I had inadvertently puddled thoughtfully collected.

I am head over heels in love with this new scope!  Microscopes are like sewing machines.  People who are just starting buy a cheap machine to see if they like it.  The machine balks at every turn, does a terrible job, they get frustrated and decide, no, they don't like it.

A good machine, OTH, is a joy to use.  More to the point, it's easy to use.  A careful 6 year old can spend many happy hours with a good microscope!

What are you looking for in a microscope?  You want something binocular (2 eyepieces) so you don't have to squint, one fairly low objective to make it easy to find what you are looking for, and one or two higher objectives so you can get a closer look.  Cast off university (or laboratory) scopes are ideal.

I paid $40, thanks to Mr. Bill being on the look out!  If this scope were new, it would cost $800- $1000, but it has a lot of extras (an oil objective for example) and it's a heavy duty scope. It's also at least 15 years old and made of metal.  I saw decent basic scopes for $200.  It pays to go surplus!!