Well, imagine you are walking along the shore of the lake. The water is calm and clear for the first time all summer. So you wade in and begin to pull out the trash that washes in with regularity from who knows where...bricks, chunks of concrete, rusted metal pipes, broken glass, etc. Then, about fifteen feet away, from out of the water, a head arises on a long slender neck. It hovers above you suggesting the creature may be thirty feet in length! Its small head lowers and you can see its mouth lined with tiny sharp teeth, perfect for snatching small fish. It looks directly into your face with its large lidless eyes and then backs away slowly and slips into the water and with a powerful sweep of its hind quarters it is gone. That most certainly has never happened to me. But wouldn't it be cool if it did! Instead what happened was, as I was wading along pulling crap out of the lake, I thought I saw a smashed can so I reached down and it turned out not to be a can at all, but rather a prehistoric beast that had washed ashore, just like I said in the title, but it was fossilized of course. Almost as cool as seeing a live lake monster.
It is about 7 inches in diameter and sliced about 3/4 of an inch thick. The back is the shell, but this view shows the inner structure. It is some kind of nautaloid/snaily looking thing with the inner chambers filled with different materials. Right near the opening there appears to be hardened sand. The next several chambers have a more quartz-like look. Some of the chambers are filled with dark brown material and some with a raw umber colored material. It's absolutely beautiful as you can see. If anybody out there knows what this is and when it lived in Lake Erie, I'd be curious to find out.
The stone wave is slowly growing as well. Here is what it looked like two weeks ago. It is starting to gather some momentum.
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