Morocco: Fossils

I love fossils! On our way to the dessert we stopped in Erfoud, a town well known for its marble industry which produces a black marble containing fossils. The morning we were leaving we decided to visit one of the fossil workshops.
The shop was impressive. The walls and the shelves were littered with carved stones containing fossils. The man in the shop explained to us that they find the chunks of marble rock and then they polish the rock until it has a smooth surface so they can make it into sinks or plates or whatever they want. Apart from that they also carved them individually.

At first some of the fossils seemed to impressive to be real. But then the man explained that the fossils were originally all jumbled up one on top of the other, and that they separated them to leave the best ones on the rock. The photograph at the top has my shoe next to the fossil so you can compare the size. And the photo at the bottom is one of the working tables in which they chiseled the fossils.