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This specimen was the find of the day today and came from Randolph Co. WV in what I believe to be the Brallier Formation. Any help with ID would be much appreciated.

Found this this morning. As near as I can tell its from a siltstone layer of the Brallier formation. I know that there's not a lot of contrast or detail but any ID suggestions are appreciated. Its about 1 inch long. Second item showed up when I was trimming prior to prep (Its .25 inch).

I'm having a hard time figuring out the formation of the fossils I found today. The layer is about 4 feet wide. Fresh it appears to be a gray shale. It weathers quickly to a buff very soft siltstone with pale purple swirls. Some fractures show a colorful (red, orange, yellow, black, brown) iron staining. The PA geologic survey map for Altoona marks this as a Brailler formation area but that formation's description doesn't seem to fit what I found. Does this description sound familiar to anyone? If pics would help I can take some tommorow.

I don't throw around the word "best" casually, but I think it's safe to say that my recent trip was one of the best in all my years collecting, if not the best. I spent the better part of five or six hours collecting at numerous different sites across western Maryland ranging in age from the lower Devonian to the lower Mississippian, so this is part one of my posts (for simplicity's sake I may include photos of most of my other finds from these sites even if I didn't collect them last go around). The trip started off okay. I visited a couple of my oldest sites that are some small roadside exposures of the Oriskany Sandstone and Mahantango Formation. These sites produced decent material in the past, but over the repeated years of collecting I seem to have worn them out as this time all I found were some brachiopods (including a decent Mucrospirifer sp. from the Mahantango site). I'll talk more about these finds later, but afterwards I found time to visit a new site in the Brallier Formation. By this point it had started to thunder, and while driving to the site the rain started to come in and fog filled up the valley. I thought it was the end of my trip, but as I got to the site it was pretty much dry. My best guess is that I was simply hearing a storm from way off in the distance. The site I visited, as I recently learned, might actually expose two different formations: the Brallier Formation and the Foreknobs Formation. The difficulty in discerning between the various upper Devonian formations in Maryland is multifold. First off, the MGS doesn't differentiate the Harrell, Brallier, and Scherr Formations, even on their most recent geologic maps. Second of all the literature around these deposits is scant and very dated. Most still use the (now) incorrect Woodmont and Chemung Formations, which further exacerbates problems as the Woodmont Formation consisted of the current Brallier and Scherr Formations, making it difficult for an amateur like me to really tell just which fossils occur in either formation. On top of this the contact between the Harrell, Brallier, Scherr, and Foreknobs is mostly gradational, so the differentiating layers lithologically is next to impossible as the beds gradually blend into one another. Generally speaking the Harrell is a dark shale with a fossiliferous limestone (the Tully Limestone) demarcating it's base, the Brallier is mostly dark, fissile shale with interbeds of siltstone, the Scherr is mostly lighter colored shale and siltstone with some sandstone beds, and the Foreknobs is a mixture of gray shales, red shales, conglomerate, sandstone, and siltstone. A guide fossil for the Brallier is the brittle star trace fossil Pteridichnites biseriatus, which was the fossil I originally set out to collect and found in the darker shale. Generally speaking the brachiopod genus Cyrtospirifer sp. in particular C. disjunctus is a guide fossil for the Foreknobs, but I believe this genus also occurs in the Brallier Formation. I found both fossils at this site, the brittle star in the dark shale and the brachiopod in a reddish siltstone, and considering the transition in rock types (one end of the site was just dark, fissile shale and the other had significant amounts of conglomerate and siltstone with shell beds) I think it's likely that the upper end of the cut was in the basal Foreknobs Formation and the lower end was in the upper layers of the Brallier Formation. As such, all of my trace fossils are from the Brallier and almost all of my other fossils are from the Foreknobs. The Brallier Formation is a late Devonian turbidite unit that was deposited in fairly deep water as the Acadian Mountains eroded. It is mostly unfossiliferous, but does have the occasional pelycopod, gastropod, and trace fossil (these being the most common). Ammonoids are also reported from the Brallier. Like I said earlier I originally came trying to find the brittle star trace fossil Pteridichnites but I ended up finding some other very interesting trace fossils. I picked up two of them because I had seen images of similar looking things from the Pennsylvanian of Alabama which I believe @Rockin' Ric labeled as resting traces from horseshoe crabs. These are late Devonian, deep water marine in origin, not terrestrial/freshwater from the Pennsylvanian, so I don't really know what they could be. Perhaps from some other arthropod? Anyways I also found some brittle star traces, including a group of what look to be four or five Pteridichnites biseriatus oriented in life position as if it were an imprint of the brittle star body. Image 1: Pteridichnites biseriatus Image 2: A group of four poorly preserved P. biseriatus Image 3: Unknown arthropod (?) trace fossil Image 4: Unknown arthropod (?) trace fossil If any of you guys know what the last two fossils are, please feel free to let me know.