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Taking a break from prep to scale steep hills of glacial erratics from the Devonian. Since our Adam is under the weather, this will be solely a brachapalooza to bring him cheer. This is a live event, pics as they happen.

Does anyone know of some good fossil sites in the Phoenix area, or within a couple of hours drive? Will be spending a couple of months there. Atrypa

As the missus is at work, I couldn't secure a ride to kickboxing training, and I don't have any assignments to grade (yet), why waste a perfectly lovely morning? So out I hiked to the area just beyond my backyard to poke around in the spoil hills. As I've pretty much picked the place clean, my expectations were low enough that I didn't think I'd come away with anything - which was fine as I would be surrounded by the sights, sounds, and smells of nature. The spoils were laid down over a dozen years ago, and nothing all that new gets exposed over time; rather, sand and sticky mud that bakes hard covers more rock, or weeds and saplings extend their territory. I didn't come away with anything spectacular. Apart from a fragment of a very rare trilobite in these parts, this year has been a bit of a bust at this site. Mixed with construction debris are plenty of lower and middle Devonian limestones and sandstones, many of those that have no reliable bedding planes, or are just filled with tiny brachiopods, some bryozoa, bivalves, etc. There are virtually no trilobites left, apart from tiny fragments here and there. But I did find some ok stuff to take back with me. First up would be these relatively large brachs. I don't usually encounter big brachs in Devonian rocks:

A friend found out about my hobby of fossiking (particularly urchins) and says "oh, there are hundreds of the round urchins on my property, come on out!" So, I did and was initially disappointed to find out that what he thought were round urchins, were in fact algal fruiting bodies or porocystis globularis (as I discovered a while back when I first found the fossil forum, thinking I had some cool eggs....) So finding literally hundreds of these globularis was quite cool, but I wanted urchins! Now, also, there were urchins. Lots and lots and lots...of heart urchins. Which I like. A lot. But I also find them quite frequently where I am. I was wanting ROUND urchins! I havn't found but a few of those in my huntings. So I kept hunting. And was rewarded with a few small but nice phymosoma texanum round urchins. Yay!! And a mess of nice gastopods and bivlaves (some really adorable, yes, adorable, small deer heart clams) .All in all, a good days hunt!