Fossil Excavation

This work is inspired from fossil excavation. I designed a special hollow thin-walled fossil blind box and used parametric software to design some bionic texture.

From the outside, the model is complete closed stone. You don't know what fossil is inside. You need to remove the stone wall to get the final fossil. This simulates the process of fossil excavation, which is full of unknowns, rituals and fun.

I designed three types of marine fossils in total, they are ammonite, trilobite and fish.You can scale the model and use more realistic printing materials as needed.

Note: The side with many small holes is the removal side. You need pliers and a knife.

Design process The initial model was open. I placed the side with the fossil facing down, hoping to close the model with the generated supports, so that the process of removing the supports would be like the fossil excavation. However, the supports were very difficult to remove, and the surface quality of the fossil was very terrible.

The second time I improved the design and used porous thin walls (0.6mm thick) to completely enclose the model. The thin wall and the fossil part did not touch each other,so that the quality of the fossil model would not be affected after removal. Moreover, it formed a more perfect shape of the stone.It was an interesting try.Let me know if you have a better idea about this work,thanks!

2025.03.27 Updated with the the second installment.The connection is here: https://makerworld.com/en/models/1253641-fossil-excavation-2#profileId-1276586