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Hey, all! I have a surplus of Upper Ordovician (Cincinnattian series) and Silurian fossils from the Dayton area. Fossils include diverse brachiopods, horn corals, orthoconic nautiloids, and bryozoans as well as trilobite fragments. Would anyone like to trade for these fossils? If there's anything in particular that you'd like from the area that I don't already have in my collection, then I may be able to go search for it before the trade, too. If anyone expresses interest, then I'll upload images of said fossils in the next few days. Let me know!

The Three Kings Stationary epifaunal suspension feeders Heliophyllum is an extinct genus of corals that existed predominantly in the Devonian. Heliophyllum is of the order Rugosa and can be referred to as horn corals. This is what the internet tells you about this well known and popular fossil coral and that's about it. I'm fortunate to have collecting sites here in NY with excellent examples of this very cool fossil. I thought it would be neat for you to see examples of three types of Heliophyllum that I find. Of course the most common species I find is Heliophyllum halli (Edwards and Haime 1851) the solitary rugose. This is The King of Heliophyllum corals and are common to find here in NY at certain localities. Complete or "fresh" specimens are uncommon. A fresh coral would be one that has just weathered from the formation and is undamaged, unworn/tumbled by a stream. The majority of the Heliophyllum halli corals I find are 1-3 inches long with many being between 3-6 inches and a few over 6 inches in length. I find some with perfectly preserved epibionts that help tell a story of that paleoenvironment Heliophyllum halli lived in. The next King of this story is Heliophyllum confluens (Hall 1876) the colonial rugose coral. This species is much rarer then the solitary Heliophyllum halli. Confluens can form large colonies made up of several individual coralites that form a solid coral head. Each colony is different and many fantastic shapes can be found in this species. The third King is Heliophyllum delicatum (Oliver and Sorauf, 1994) a budding colonial coral. Delicatum is only found in the lower Deep Run Shale Member of the Moscow formation. This is my favorite of the three kings. They are the rarest Heliophyllum to find and complete undamaged colonies are near impossible due to their delicate nature. Unlike Heliophyllum confluens, delicatum coralites do not grow together to form a coral head. Instead each coralite individually grows out of a single main corals calyx. This can happen several times within the same colony forming a bouquet of fossil corals. I am not an expert on corals past or present. These are my observations over years of fossil collecting in New York. I hope this helps in your fossil ID or clears up some confusion when talking about these Kings of horn corals. mikey

Last week I made my third annual pilgrimage back to the Chicago area to visit family, do a little fossil hunting, gorge myself on great ethnic foods and treat myself to some Chicago-style deep-dish stuffed pizza for my birthday--yum! I had hoped to pick up some more Pit 2 (Braidwood Biota) Mazon Creek nodules from Fossil Rock campground in Wilmington but sadly it is now closed and up for auction with the distinct possibility that it will never again allow fossil hunters to gather nodules from the spoil piles at the back of the campground. Instead, I figured on focusing back on the Pit 11 (Essex Biota) nodules in the Mazonia/Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area where I first had hunted nodules since learning about them several years ago. I had hoped on meeting up with some TFF members but unfortunately this turned out to be a busy weekend for them and we never managed to get out for a group nodule hunt. I did make it out to Mazonia/Braidwood for a couple hours of the weekend. Luckily, this location in Braceville is only a short 45 minute drive from where we were staying so it is quite convenient to pop over there. The weather report did not look good for Saturday afternoon and soon after we arrived the low clouds and mist turned to drizzle and then to rain and we were chased out with little to show for our efforts. We did a little better on Sunday and I have a small cache of nodules soaking in a bucket at the moment before their first freeze/thaw cycle on a shelf in my freezer. I had suggested to the TFF members in the greater Chicagoland area (including far western cities and extending into Wisconsin) that if there were other fossil hunting opportunities in the area that I might be able to replace Fossil Rock campground with some other novel (to me and my wife, anyway) location. Rob Russell suggested a small road cut in north central Illinois as a possibility but stated that a much more certain location would be the St. Leon roadcut in southeastern Indiana. We considered how we wanted to plan our week in Chicago and decided that Friday would be the best day for a roadtrip to Indiana. Google Maps (for some unknown reason) showed this trip as just under 4 hours. I figured that would be only an hour more than we normally drive to get to the Peace River here in Florida and that we could do it as a day trip. We got up early on Friday (easy to get out of bed with the prospect of fossil hunting ahead) and were on the road before 6am. Being reasonably close to the Summer Solstice and at a much more northerly than our normal South Florida latitude, the days were long and we were able to depart in daylight. We ducked under the southern tip of Lake Michigan and once in Indiana headed southeast on I-65 toward Indianapolis. Right away I could see that the Google Maps estimate of arrival time was optimistic. Large swaths of I-65 were under construction and there seemed to be as many large semi trucks on the road as cars. We stopped off along the way for a quick breakfast and continued to make steady progress toward Indianapolis. We had planned on stopping there because in my haste to pack for the Chicago trip I had forgotten to pack a long sleeve shirt. I have had more than my fair share of solar radiation as a kid spending my days shirtless and shoeless running around the country roads of northern Wisconsin with the local kids during my youth and now prefer to spend my time in South Florida covered up from the sun as much as possible. Rather than lathering up armfuls of sunblock I tend to prefer long sleeve shirts for their abrasion protection as much as their SPF. I set the GPS for the address of a Target store in Indianapolis as we had left the Chicagoland area before they were open. Unfortunately, we got the E or W prefix wrong on the street address and ended up some 16 miles away from the store. We managed to find a discount store in the area and after about 5 minutes of shopping (twice my normal preferred extent) I came away with my new "in the field" shirt for the extravagant price of $2.50. Back on the highway again and heading toward the town of St. Leon. We were making reasonable time (as best we could with the traffic and construction) but realized that 4 hours was a hopelessly unrealistic travel time. When I double-checked the distance I realized that it was around 280 miles and a 70 mph average speed would be needed to make this journey in the specified time. As that was the limit on the fastest parts of the highway we would not be arriving mid-morning as I'd originally planned. In the end we arrived for an early lunch in St. Leon where we (surprisingly) found vegetarian food at a restaurant called Skyline Chili. Chili they had--several large cauldrons of it bubbling away in the open kitchen area--but skyline? The only skyline visible in this open rural area was that shown in silhouette on their sign. Post lunch we headed north on Old State 1 till we saw the splendor of the extensive roadcut that I'd seen in Google Maps satellite imagery or in the trip photos of other groups that have hunted here before us. This roadcut through the 450 million year old Upper Ordovician deposits seems to have been an effort to minimize the slope of the highway running through its middle. We parked well off the road on the extensive shoulder near the drainage area and could hear the frequent trucks and cars go by. On their way up the incline we could hear the trucks shifting into low gear to climb the grade and the engine breaking of the trucks making the opposite trip. We were the only ones there, the sun was shining, the weather was pleasant and within minutes of parking the car we saw that the rocks around us were virtually carpeted with brachiopods and other fossils--it was going to be a good day. It had taken us 6 hours to get here (50% longer than originally estimated) but with the prospect of a new and exciting hunting opportunity, we couldn't be happier. For those who have not yet seen the roadcut at St. Leon here is what it looks like looking down the sloping highway with terraced slopes flanking the road. You'll notice the wide shoulder and the shallow drainage trough which make for safe parking well away from the traffic. The photo of the brachiopod slab right next to where we parked the car indicated a productive day was ahead of us.