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Platycerid Gastropods from the Widder Shale, Ontario
Jeffrey P posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Middle Devonian
Platyceras bucculentum Platycerid Gastropods Middle Devonian Widder Shale Hungry Hollow Arkona, Ontario A generous gift from Kane-
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Select finds from the Late Cretaceous Fort Crittenden Formation south of Tucson, AZ. Who's good at gastropod ID?
Benjamin Mohler posted a topic in Fossil Hunting Trips
The area we explored was lousy with snails and unionid bivalves. Here are some of the more complete gastropods:- 3 replies
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Into Fossils in Five Minutes!!! First rock reveals an Ammonite! Last rock does, too!
SPrice posted a topic in Fossil Hunting Trips
This trip was planned for last weekend but my wife was scheduled to fly home and the kiddos were working or busy so I get the pleasure of picking her up. The foul weather extended the flight plans from mid morning to 5 pm. I could have had my cake and eaten it too. Oh well, I picked the better choice . So this morning I got up at 5 AM, grabbed my gear and nutritive goodies and hit the road. South by South East to Price, UT- 129 miles/207 km from home. A beautiful day was forecast, but I was quite surprised at the temperature drop as I went over Solider Summit pass. 32F read the dash light. Enough about the weather...it did indeed bloom into a beautiful late summer day. Blue skies, 80F. I flubbed a few turns onto BLM land and had to U-turn it back 2 miles to get to one of my Google Maps pinned favorites. In reality, it wouldn't have made a difference. I checked the map with my destination pins and one fav was 22 miles from the first one and the last one was 50 miles from the first. It looks way smaller online than in reality. duhh! My favorite new Spanish word is "Cuesta" . pronounced coo-esta. Wiki says-A cuesta (from Spanish cuesta "slope") is a hill or ridge with a gentle slope on one side, and a steep slope on the other. To me it looks like a perfect surfing wave, nice face in the front and lot of water behind it to power it along. Here's one in the distance. Imagine 50 miles of these beautiful land waves spitting out lovely fossil filled concretions right down the the face of the wave. Kinda like the shores of England. You can see the two lines. It's the cuesta in the distance, not the gully wash below my car on the left foreground. I parked there and hiked down the gully across the wash keeping an eye on the banks and wash debris. Nothing. Then about 200 meters to the base of the closest cuesta for some scouting. That took about Five Minutes. First brown concretion I came upon at the cuesta base got a taste of hammer. Bam! Fossil Bomb! Bivalves, Gastropods and my target fossil Ammonites! Double bivalve is number one find of the day. Same concretion rewards me with my first ammo. The two species reputed to be in these concretions and stratigraphy are prionocyclus hyatti and prionocyclus wyomingensis. This one is the former in robust form. I actually kissed this one I was so stoked. lol. After that I started scouting for concretions and well...let's just say there is no shortage. I then surveyed the immediate landscape and decided to go south first to walk the base and ridge of this rather short cuesta and try to determine the best source. After too long of a hike I found the distribution to about the same. So instead of north I hiked up the face of the slope and checked out the layers. The top had no particular showing of concretions eroding out so that put them coming out a little lower down. The top had shale or sandstone looking material all over the edge. Nothing was showing so I flipped a few of the larger layered slabs. Sure enough the underside had something completely different. So please throw in your best ID names at will. There was a shaley patch on top of these things like smashed potato chips/crisps which brushed off easily revealing the forest of something unfamiliar to me. Crinoids? maybe, IDK. A marine coral? maybe, IDK. Something else? Well I should do my homework. The slab panel and a closeup of the left section. Any ideas? Or expert ID? Cretaceous is the period. Here's the result of one concretion revealing its innards. At least 5 species. And a little friend/distraction. Bottom of the card. Closeup of previous concretion contents. The concretions were sometimes extremely crumbly with most every fossil breaking with the exception mostly with the bivalves. Ammos broke about the same ratio as the gastropods. A small pile of concretions to break open. There were a few other side adventures while scouting the cuesta but I'll end with the very last concretion I struck open. It made my day! One hit on the widest circumference. CRACK! It split open just as you see it. To wind up the commentary, I had Pete and Repeat in the boat with me again. Just like my second trip to Kemmerer, WY, fossil quarry. If you're not familiar with Pete and Repeat, it's a simple annoying joke. I say: Pete and Repeat were in a boat, Pete fell overboard. Who was left? You say: Repeat. I say: Pete and Repeat were in a boat, Pete fell overboard. Who was left? You: either say Repeat again and I repeat the joke or you get it and roll your eyes. Connect the joke to my two fossil hunting trips. Higher altitude, warming sun, dehydration, too much fossil enthusiasm = I gas out by 1:30 PM and running on stubborn and will power, I make it back to the car. Same this trip as the 2nd Kemmerer trip. Except there was an audience at Kemmerer. Just me and lizards this trip. My intention was to fill a bucket or milk crate with fossils; reality-a partial fill. Left the mystery marine fossil above my base camp. Will need to go back with cooler weather and carrying more H2O with electrolytes and not one Diet Dew with Pineapple juice mixed to carry to the digging site...NOT in the vehicle which may as well had been on Mars. I had 3 gallons of ice water, two Capri Suns, a 16 oz water bottle and another Diet Dew or three for the ride home. Plus lunch. Barely made it to the vehicle with a couple stops to cover the 300 yards. Two pounds lighter than yesterday. More pics if interested. PS -Roger (Ludwigia) pack your bags, book a flight. This destination is at 6,000'ASL, flat ground for the most part, multiple trips to the vehicle with the finds, free transportation from the airport & fossil site plus room and board! I'll be going back a number of times this season and post winter snow melt which is usually minimal down south in Utah. The name of the area is Mounds Reef if anyone is curious about it. Not the specific hunting sites, just a big chunk of desert real estate. Approx. 100 sq miles of not much but cuestas, yeah!- 13 replies
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Hello everyone, A couple of weeks ago I had the chance to visit a more distant fossil locality - an opportunity that I took to collect some Paleozoic fossils among the scenic Appalachians of eastern West Virginia. Heading out west, I planned to visit a new exposure of the Needmore Shale that I suspected had the potential to produce some nice trilobite specimens. Unfortunately, upon arriving at the locality rain was coming down in droves, effectively ending any chance of prospecting the locality. Hoping to escape the rain, I made my way farther south toward the well known Lost River road cut in the vicinity of Wardensville, West Virginia. As I had hoped I did manage to escape the rain, and I was left with a few hours to search for some Devonian fossils among the fissile green shale. I had only been to the Lost River locality once before late last year, and I had managed to secure the trilobites which had proven rather elusive in the more fossiliferous rocks of the Mahantango. The rain, which did seem to have swept through the area shortly before I arrived, had turned the fine rock dust that coated the talus piles into slippery mud. Above the treacherous talus piles, a large vertical exposure of the Needmore Shale held trilobites and a variety of other shallow marine fauna that had once inhabited a Devonian reef. Here are the finds from both trips I have taken to the Lost River locality: A few small brachiopods from the locality. Unlike other Paleozoic localities I have had the opportunity to visit, brachiopods do not seem to be extremely common at the road cut. I only came across them occasionally, with most being so small they were hard to identify without the aid of a magnifiying glass. A spiral gastropod preserved in iron oxide that contrasts quite nicely with the dark green matrix. On the most recent trip I found the two above specimens exposed on the surface of the shale. They seem like they could be the central lobe of trilobite pygidiums with the other two sections having weathered away. Any insight into what these might be would be greatly appreciated . Rugose coral The specimen above is intriguing. The roundish shape seems to suggest a fossil, though it could very well have a geological origin. I apologize for the poor photographs of the above specimen, but it was incredibly difficult to get the camera to focus on it properly. When I came across this fossil whilst splitting shale, I was quite confident that I had come across a trilobite due to the black calcitic appearance and the 'ribbing' that seemed to define the fossil. Yet after extracting and cleaning the fossil, it does not resemble a trilobite and is very faint even after the shale dust was removed. Any suggestions as to what it might be would be very welcome . Some assorted Dipleura ribs. Some trilobite ribs, likely either belonging to Dipleura or Eldredgeops rana. Eldredgeops rana pygidium preserved in a light yellow color. Enrolled Eldredgeops rana consisting of the body with a partial cephalon (first two images) and the pygidium on the reverse side (last image). The trilobite is flattened, which may be a result of the tectonic forces acting on the rock during the uplift of the Appalachian mountains. Another Eldredgeops rana specimen with considerable relief from the surrounding matrix. This specimen was found in association with a few others, though if it possessed a cephalon it was lost among the chips of shale. A prone Eldredgeops rana molt found on the first outing to the road cut. Positive and negative of an Eldredgeops rana molt. Thanks for taking a look!
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Gastropod and Greenops Trilobite from Smokes Creek
Jeffrey P posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Middle Devonian
(left) Naticonema lineata Platycerid Gastropod 7/8 inch (right) Greenops sp. Folded Phacopid Trilobite 7/8 inch Middle Devonian Moscow Formation Windom Shale Hamilton Group Smokes Creek Blasdell, N.Y.-
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It's been a couple of weeks but it's taken me this long to take all the photos of my fossil finds from my trip to Oklahoma with the Paleontological Society of Austin! Our yearly trek to find Silurian, Devonian and Ordovician finds (not much of that in Texas!) was a great success again, thanks to our OK friends! Since it's just over a 6 hour drive for me, I went up early on Friday to hit a couple of "non field trip" spots before our "real" field trip on Saturday and Sunday. I had heard about a Permian site that I was excited to check out. It's a weird barren moonscape in the middle of a field. It was a bit warm.....and the sun radiating up from the baked clay was....intense. Fortunately a cold front was on the way so I kept reminding myself that the 90's of this Friday would recede into memory. But yeah...it was hot. There were bone bits everywhere....everywhere! But they were pretty crunched up. I didn't find much more than a few not-well preserved vertebrae, some okay bone bits, a few nice little amphib teeth and a couple of quite nice unbroken orthocanthus teeth. Tiny tiny ones, because all the big ones break easily. While I didn't find a lot of quality stuff initially, I did haul out about 60lbs of matrix so I can look through at my leisure at home! I learned a valuable lesson though...take two smaller buckets rather than one large bucket. It's a LOT easier to haul out two 30 lbs instead of one big haul a quarter mile over rough terrain! A little amphibian tooth: EDIT:...I thought these were Amphib teeth, but apparently....they are Orthocanthus Shark coprolites! hahahhha They are 1/4 inch each What is most amazing about these fossils is the color of the preservation. Astounding reds, yellows and purples. The little Orthocanthus shark teeth that were mostly complete. The Permian "moonscape": I decided to hit one other site before I headed to Ada where we were all meeting. It was the Ordivician site that I found a lovely Oklahomacystis echinoderm last year. The cold front had moved in and the temperature dropped almost 20 degrees and was just LOVELY hunting! I didn't find any more Oklahomacystis and wasn't finding much except a few nice brachiopods, but then I saw a crinoid calyx piece upside down (all I saw was the edges but I recognized it as crinoid) picked it up and got a nice surprise!! Too bad it's not the whole thing and just one segment, but I'll take what I get! It's a beauty...the geometric patterning is amazing. It is a Pleurocystites echinoderm. It's 1 1/4 inch wide. Early on Saturday, the whole group goes to Yellow Bluff which is a huge area above a creek and up a hillside. It's a great site with a plethora of fauna. It is completely possible to spend an ENTIRE day there! But first we had to drive through the pasture and the cows! They were nice cows. Yellow Bluff - It is primarily Silurian with a cap of Devonian at the very top of the hill. It is Henryshouse formation (which I keep wanting to call Harryhousen.... hahahha - that's for any of you old school animation lovers out there) And not only were the fossils abundant, so were the Missouri Primroses! A few nice finds in the field- A Gastropod Platyceras, Crinoid cup - I think this might be Ollulocrinus? A pink Brachiopod! Here's that pink brach again: I found a couple of Trilos, nothing quite good (last year I found the best one!!) but I did find one large one which still has lots of matrix on it, an interesting half a one, split vertically, not horizontally and then some others not very well preserved. This is an odd bit of crinoid : not sure what it is: So aside from the above pics of the in situ pieces, my only other really good find was this brachiopod Dictyonella. It was originally thought to have a bryozoan growing on it, but turns out it is actually the pattern of the brachiopod! There was also this cool bryozoan which I thought was a horn coral when I picked it up, only realizing it was bryzoan as I photographed it! It's 1 1/2 inches in size! But I did bring home a bucket of matrix and am having fun going through it, so will post some of those at a later time. Oh, and there were scorpions out and about enjoying the cool weather too. Hopefully no scorps in my bucket of matrix..... if so, now they are Texas Scorps. So Sunday was Black Cat Mountain Day. If you are not familiar with the trilobites from Black Cat Mountain...you are in for a google treat. Of course, finding the rare trilobites is.....rare. But there are plenty of other amazing things to find at Bob's quarry! The Quarry is Devonian with Haragan and Bois D'Arc Formations. But the trilobites are of course, the favorite. While I love the rollers the best (not sure why, I just do) I actually found better "open" ones this time than rollers! All of these are about an inch long. Paciphacops sp. Kainops sp. and not sure what this one is...probably Kainops and a surprising find of a (sadly not complete, but more complete than the typical) Huntoniatonia huntonensis Usually you just find the pygidiums...they are ALL OVER THE PLACE and they get HUGE. The biggest pygidium I found was 2" x 2"...just the trilobutt! It would have been a monster trilo. But the brachiopods are almost as amazing as the trilos. My favorite is this Howollella (I think) covered in Beekite: This is a big silicified Anastrophia (1 inch) An interesting Meristella with some crystals Orthostrophia and a neat coral which I think is Syringaxon perhaps? And one of my favorites to find - straight shelled cephalopods. This by far the most intact one I found. They are usually only three or four chambers but can get to be almost an inch in diameter. This one is 5 inches long And finally , my other favorite find from Black Cat Mountain.....a beautiful bryozoan ring:
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Miocene Moon Snail from Matoaka Cottages, MD.
Jeffrey P posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Tertiary
Euspira heros Moon Snail 1 and 1/4 inches across Miocene Choptank Formation Drum Cliff Member Chesapeake Group Matoaka Cottages St. Leonard, MD. A gift from historianmichael. Thanks Mike.-
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From the album: Middle Devonian
Retispira leda Bellerophontoid Gastropod 1 inch wide Middle Devonian Moscow Formation Windom Shale Hamilton Group Deep Springs Road Quarry Earlville, N.Y.-
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From the album: Cretaceous
Ringicula pulchella Gastropod 1/3 inch long Upper Cretaceous Severn Formation Monmouth group Prince George's Co., MD. Thanks to Michael Historian for ID-
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From the album: Lower Devonian fossils
Platystoma sp. Platyceratid gastropods Lower Devonian Glenerie Limestone Tristates group Eastern NY-
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From the album: Silurian
Homotoma sp. Gastropod Internal Mold Late Silurian Mifflintown Formation Bellwood, PA.-
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From the album: Lower Devonian
Platystoma ventricosa Platyceratoid Gastropod Lower Devonian Glenerie Limestone Tristates Group Route 9W Glenerie, N.Y.- 1 comment
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Hello and Happy New Year to all of my Fossil Friends! Yesterday and today I put in my first 2 hunts of the year. The weather here has been mild and I almost went fishing instead. But the fossil gods were calling to me and I couldn't resist their siren song. I decided to visit a site that I haven't been to for awhile. I am sorry but a have made a New Years resolution to no longer name locations for the world to see. This is a site that I have gone a few times with minimal results. Mainly it is a rather large site and the rock is hard to work. But I knew the potential for nice finds were there. So, Yesterday I arrived in the afternoon, planning on putting in a few hours. I started off on a lower layer. Now there is multiple layers of shale mixed with slate and limestone. The way this material fractures is rather strange. Which makes recovery of specimens rather tough. So while I found many cool things most where damaged in some way. Crinoids, brachiopods, bivalves, gastropods, nautiloids and trilo Cephalons were fairly common. Some were even pyritized. I must have been there for a couple hours before I decided to explore farther up the slope. I noticed a different color rock closer to the top, but there was really no where to stand. I grabbed a couple loose pieces and started seeing parts of corals and crinoids that were larger then any I have found before. Also partial trilo bits and pieces of Eldregoeps. I looked for a way to get to the very top of the slope and found a way that was not at first obvious. And then bingo! I found a small section that was easier to work and I immediately was rewarded. I started finding abundant amounts of horn coral, large crinoid segments and a nice slab with a horn coral with a trilo right next to it and possibly more. Then I removed a chunk of rock and uncovered a huge tabulate coral about the size of a dinner plate. Unfortunately this specimen was fragile and was broke into a million pieces. But I recovered some of the larger pieces. It started getting dark so I left for home with plants to go back this morning, which I did. Today was much of the same tons of corals but one horn coral was about the size of a grapefruit. This is definitely a different species than I am used to seeing. Most if not all need to be cleaned up and possibly prepped. So I plan on trying to clean up and get the mud off. I will post pics later this evening. It looks like this year has started off with a bang. I hope it is a sign of things to come.
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Hello everyone, I've had this topic on my mind for a while now and thought I'd ask the forum to see if anyone has any knowledge or information related to this. We all know about the various transitions to land done by plants, arthropods and most famously tetrapods but one I don't see often discussed is that of gastropods. I wanted to ask here if anyone has any resources where I could learn more about this transition(s) I think it would be really interesting to know when, and how it happened. I don't even know if we have much information about this since snails don't tend to fossilize with something like lungs or gills but I assume there may be morphological or chemical changes within the shell that may give us clues as well as contextual ones based on the environment it was found in. If anyone knows anything on the topic or has any helpful resources where I could learn about it, I would greatly appreciate it. Thank you!
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Hello, here are some pics of my finds from Whiskey Bridge that I did earlier this year. I really enjoy this site as to the variety of fossils to be found and the nice preservation of them. First one is: Rotularia lepstostoma (worm tube) I thought it was a funky gastropod until I looked it up.
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Hi Everyone, Last month I took a trip from New York to Elizabethtown, Kentucky to attend my parents' 70th anniversary. My sister and her husband, two of her adult children, and my parents, both in their 90s have all resettled there. I try to visit them at least once per year, but my parents' 70th wedding anniversary could not be missed. It is a very long trip from the suburbs of New York City to E-Town and a stop along the way was the sensible thing to do, so I spent the night in Harrison, Ohio near the border with Indiana and only 15 minutes from St. Leon, the well known Ordovician roadcut. I've been there twice before. It is a huge outcrop, fossiliferous from top to bottom, with plenty to explore. With even a full day it is impossible to do justice to the site. As it was, I spent a half day. Most of you I'm guessing have been to or seen pictures of the roadcut. Here's a couple anyway:
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Hawaii Fossil Trip-- Oahu Pleistocene, Part II: Gastropods & Echinoids
hemipristis posted a topic in Fossil Hunting Trips
A follow-up/continuation of my previous post, here are some of the fossil invertebrates from the Pleistocene Waimanalo Formation of Oahu, Hawaii, USA. First the echinoids. I haven't speciated these yet- 20 replies
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Hello all. I am posting a link to a calendar I created for 2023. It showcases twelve different late Paleozoic gastropods I have recovered over the past three years in Armstrong County, Pennsylvania. Eleven of them are from the Pine Creek limestone, and one other comes from the Brush Creek limestone. Each month features a different gastropod, photographed after coating it using ammonium chloride vapor, using an iPhone to capture photos through a microscope lens. The cover photo showcases all twelve, and the images for each month typically showcase an additional view at a much larger size. While this is a color print calendar, all the content throughout is black & white. If you enjoy natural color photos of fossils, you might skip this. I am selling this calendar without profit to me. I am still waiting to receive my copy, and I can follow up on print quality when I get mine. Lulu says this is 100 lb paper, but I'm still determining what to expect. Please PM me for purchase information.
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So this trip report is a little late in coming, but it's because the week before last was a lot to process! Just saying it was amazing would be an understatement. The Sunday before last I found the Xiphactinus with @Jared C that I've already posted about (and plan to provide an update on as soon as I'm done writing this). On Tuesday I had a job interview at the Waco Mammoth Site, and on Wednesday I got the job! Then I spent the weekend in Glen Rose, joining other volunteers from the Dallas Paleontological Society in helping Glen Kuban clean and map the dinosaur trackways recently uncovered by the horrible drought Texas has been experiencing this summer. Each of these three by themselves would be a huge highlight on my path to (hopefully) becoming a professional paleontologist, but to have all three happen in the same week? The stars must have aligned! I got more experience doing real paleo work in one week than I've had at any other point in my life, and with the new job and the fish excavation seeming like it'll be soon it looks like there's a lot more to come and I couldn't be happier about it. On to the trip report! As I said, last weekend I made the trip up to Dinosaur Valley State Park to help with the dinosaur footprints before the rain finally decided to make its way back to Texas and covered them up again. I left before sunrise on Saturday morning so I could arrive before noon while also leaving some extra time to make some stops along the way. I was hoping that I'd have some luck in the Glen Rose formation as my only experience with it before was in exposures of the lower half of the formation in Austin. Unfortunately, I didn't quite do enough research beforehand and ended up skunked - apparently the Upper Glen Rose is notoriously lacking in fossils aside from the famous dinosaur footprints. For once I was glad that I couldn't help myself when it came to making stops at every good-looking roadcut I saw. The slightly older and much more fossiliferous Comanche Peak formation is exposed almost everywhere you look closer to Waco and I had much better luck there. Here's a decent-sized Oxytropodiceras I found at one spot but ended up leaving behind since none of the fragments were very large on their own. I still want to find a complete one! By the time I got to Glen Rose I had a nice assortment of irregular echinoids (all Heteraster texanus I believe), gastropods (Tylostoma tumidum and Turritella seriatim-granulata, the latter represented by both external and internal casts), and one bivalve that could be Protocardia that I decided to keep because one side preserved both upper and lower valves and retained the original shell material which isn't very common. Of course, even though I told myself I wouldn't be tempted I did wind up taking home a different Oxytropidoceras fragment. What can I say? I'm a sucker for ammonites! I was hit with a flood of memories when I arrived in Glen Rose. I used to spend a week with my grandparents every summer at their house near Tyler when I was growing up, and they knew how much I liked all things dinosaur-related. When I was seven they took me to Glen Rose for the first time and it completely blew my mind. I liked it so much, in fact, that we went back every summer for the next five years. I hadn't been back to Dinosaur Valley State Park or the town it calls home in a while before last weekend. A lot was just as I remembered it: the Dairy Queen with its dinosaur mural, the Stone Hut Fossil Shop, and Dinosaur World with its array of concrete (and charmingly inaccurate) dinosaur statues. Even the woefully fossil-barren roadcut that I had begged my grandparents to let me explore once upon a time was right where I had last seen it. What I definitely didn't remember was the over half a mile long line of cars bumper-to-bumper trying to get into the park! It seemed like the national news coverage of the newly-exposed dinosaur tracks had been bringing people from all over - I saw more than a few license plates that were from out-of-state. As soon as I realized just how long of a wait I was in for I understood why the DPS had asked for people to begin arriving at 9 - both to beat the heat and the lines to get into the park. One fifty minute wait later and I was finally rolling up to the visitor's center. A sign out front that looked like it had just been set there said that the park was at capacity for the day, and unless visitors had prior reservations they would have to be turned away. I'm sure there were more than a few exhausted parents that were not at all looking forward to the difficult explanation they were going to have to give their dinosaur-obsessed children. After explaining to a ranger that I was there to help Glen Kuban and the DPS with the track clean-up a very friendly park ranger directed me where to go. On the way to the track site I passed the famous T. rex and Brontosaurus statues that the park was given after their debut at the 1964 New York World's Fair as part of an exhibition put on by the Sinclair Oil Corporation (their logo has been a sauropod for over 100 years!). While many of the tracks at the park are from theropods and sauropods, the park staff are keen to remind visitors that T. rex and Brontosaurus were not the trackmakers. Since their discovery the long-running theory has been that the theropod tracks were made by Acrocanthosaurus and the sauropod tracks by Sauroposeidon. The most famous tracksite is that first studied by American Museum of Natural History paleontologist R. T. Bird, showing a lone Acrocanthosaurus pursuing a herd of Sauroposeidon across the Early Cretaceous coastline. There are also other tracks made by an ornithopod similar to Iguanodon. Following the ranger's direction took me through a bumpy stretch of dirt road winding through a pasture on the western side of the park. The track site where I was headed, the Taylor Site, is easily accessible by hiking along the riverbed from the center of the park, but driving there was a lot more difficult. When I finally arrived I could already see crowds of people down in the river. I had never visited this spot before in my previous trips to the park since there were so many other track sites that were more well-advertised, but it seemed like the news coverage was drawing people out to the less-visited areas. As soon as I made my way down to the riverbed I was blown away. The DPS volunteers had clearly been busy the previous weekend. A huge pile of mud and sediment was stacked to one side, revealing a neat line of giant theropod tracks so pristine it looked like it could have been made only hours before. Thankfully there wasn't an Acrocanthosaurus lurking nearby! Ripple marks were also preserved alongside many of the tracks. I made my way over to the EZ-Up tent some DPS members had set up and introduced myself. It was surreal to meet Glen Kuban, as I remembered reading an article of his when I was only 12 and curious about the "human footprint" controversy. The Taylor Site is actually the exact spot where the misidentifed human trackway is located and so Mr. Kuban generously offered to give me a short guided tour. He was quite the character, full of obvious passion for the tracks he's spent over four decades studying and willing to answer any question asked of him by interested passerby. I asked him to set me to work and he directed me to the spot where you can see a bunch of people standing in the picture above. It turns out that there is a separate set of tracks preserved very differently from the rest at this location. The tracks were also made by a theropod, but instead of appearing as indentations in the limestone they are instead raised "casts" - the result of infilling with a sturdier sediment than the other tracks close by. When the river eroded away the layers of rock covering up the tracks it also eroded out the weak sediment that had filled many of them; however, the opposite happened to this particular set. The sediment that filled them in after they were first made over 113 million years ago is actually stronger than the limestone that makes up the river bed and is thus much more resistant to the Paluxy River's currents. As Mr. Kuban explained to me, the orange-ish coloring you can just barely see in the picture below is the result of iron present in the sediment that's slowly been oxidizing as it's exposed to the air. I joined several other DPS members who were diligently scrubbing the tracks so that Mr. Kuban could get better photos of them for the grid map he was planning on making of the site. I was told that that was the real reason the effect of the drought had been so significant: all of these footprints had been visible at some point or another, but it had been many decades since they had all been visible at the same time. No "new" tracks were discovered recently despite what the news had been saying. After several cycles of dumping buckets of river water on the tracks, then sponging them, then scrubbing them, the tracks were finally ready for their headshots, which was then followed by an hour's worth of measurement-taking and documentation. Below is a picture of the dream team at work! From left to right: Joe (a graduate student from Columbus who knew Mr. Kuban and who flew down just to work on the tracks), me, Murray (a DPS member and volunteer fossil preparer at the Perot Museum in Dallas), and Mr. Kuban, with grid paper and trusty clipboard in hand. I felt guilty not doing much more than scrubbing limestone and holding a tape measure for the rest of the day (not that I wasn't having the time of my life doing it!), as I could imagine just how much work had gone into shoveling and sweeping away all the mud that had been covering the main trackways. Major props to the hard-working members of the DPS that spent the weekend prior doing all that labor in the Texas heat! The tracksite looked amazing, and many of the visitors to the park passing through where we were working agreed. I had to deflect more than a couple of thank yous - what I was doing didn't hold a candle to the mini-excavation that had been done before I ever showed up. I ended up spending the night in town at the Comfort Inn (behind which forum member @LanceH actually did discover new dinosaur tracks). Although I tried to see them the next morning before I drove back to the park, it seems like the elements haven't been kind to Lance's discovery. The footprints are in a drainage ditch and were preserved in marl that is far weaker than the limestone in the river and so were probably only visible for a couple of years at most. Sunday was spent sweeping away some of the sediment that had already been moved just in case one of the dinosaur trackways extended to the area underneath it. As it turned out, it did! After that was done I went to another spot in the park with some other volunteers to see if the tracks there needed cleaning as well. This was the tracksite I remembered visiting with my grandparents. It's called the Ballroom because unlike the Taylor Site the tracks here are a mix of overlapping trails that don't form clear pathways. Maybe the Early Cretaceous was characterized by frequent dinosaur dance-offs. The scientific community may never know. Here's one of the largest Acrocanthosaurus tracks with my size 12 shoe for comparison. The clawmarks at the end of each toe where the theropod dug into the silty earth to keep its balance are still visible after all this time. Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the sauropod tracks, but there were several nice ones at the Ballroom made by a juvenile that showed each of the strange curved toes very clearly. Speaking of sauropods, the last thing I did in town before I headed back to Waco was try some of the best good old Texas barbecue Glen Rose had to offer at a local joint named Hammond's (not a Jurassic Park reference, but I like to think it was ). Out front was a statue of a sauropod complete with horns, cowprint, and a brandmark that made me ask myself what they would have tasted like if they were still around. And that was it for my weekend! It was incredibly fun to visit one of my favorite places in the world again after so long away, and even more rewarding of an experience to get to do some real paleontology work with people that I was able to learn a lot from. Hopefully it won't be the last time- I think I'd like to make a habit of this sort of thing. Now to get to work on that fish update! - Graham
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Gastropods (Hormotoma?) and bryozoans (maybe), Upper Ordovician
Rogue Embryo posted a topic in Fossil Hunting Trips
A couple of finds at Mimico Creek (gastropods, ) and Lake Ontario (bryozoans? coral colony?) ... Thanks for any assistance! Camille