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Today on day 2, I spent about six hours in the on and off rain, near Lawrenceburg, Indiana collecting Ordovician fossils. I found numerous trilobite parts, but nothing complete. Things that believe are parts of trilobites- "Isotelus" fragments. These two pieces were on a very large block that was not feasible to try and move. I figured that I would try and get them out, but unfortunately, I was not successful . Many Cephalopods – Brachiopods- "Platystrophia" "Rafinisquina" Gastropods– Believe these to be "Cyclonema". Bryozoan– Crinoid Stems– How they were found:

This Monday we went on the last fieldtrip for this year, the weather forcast was cold but sunny so a good excuse to get out. We took te dog along and went to the quarry, A lonely excavator was operating in the far end of the pit, I went for a quick chat to let him know we were prospecting in the other side of the quarry and to ask if it was no issue for him. The fossil rich deposits had'nt moved since our last visit, but we still did find a few cephalopods. Natalie found a very promising one, the goniatite looks to be preserved completely in white calcite, I cant wait to get that one out of the matrix. For me the find of the day was a rare Carinoceras sp. goniatite , I have only a handfull of those at home, but this one is very well preserved and not compressed. Enjoy the pictures: Toto the dog prospecting the slates First goniatite of the day credits yo Natalie. a Tornoceras sp. A nice loose orthocone on the scree pile: The wite goniatite from Natalie: A large but wethered one on the scree pile. The Carinoceras sp.

Hi I was wondering are there any Cephalopods in the Bois Blanc and Onondaga formations? Thanks! @Kane

I bought a new old cabinet last winter and spent several months filling it with newly labeled specimens, most of them now stored in jewelry boxes. I took photos of it to show Tim, Fossildude19 and he suggested I post them in the Members Collections section. I followed his suggestion. The collection started in 2011 with a few fossil purchases off a well known public auction site. By the early spring of 2012 I was collecting in the field and the vast majority of my collection was self collected in that manner from sites, primarily in the Northeast and Ohio Valley as well as ones collected on trips to Texas, Germany and out west. There are also some gift specimens that I own thanks to the generosity of a number of friends, most of whom are on the Forum. The top of the cabinet is occupied by miscellaneous specimens, some that wouldn't fit in the drawers, some slated to be in a glass display case I hope to eventually get, and my collection of fossils found in New Jersey just above the Iridium Layer.

Greetings from Texas! So I have posted previously about my hunt to find all the species of Echinoids in Texas. Well, I am also on the same fossil quest for all the ammonites, nautiloids, baculites, turrilites and belemnites I can find as well! When looking for one, you might as well look for the other! So I thought I'd start a post of my ongoing hunt for all the cephalopods. I'll start with some of my finds from the recent past and I am still working on my identifications, so please do assist if you notice the wrong ID! Thanks and also post some of your finds! I'd love to see 'em! Start with some of my "backyard" finds (within 20 min drive). I am lucky to have quite a few hunting locals near me, so I occasionally find these lovely little Budaiceras from the Buda formation. I don't think this is Budaiceras, but i actually DID find it in my backyard.....in the creek behind my house, which is Edwards Formation, I believe. Not a great specimen, but the fact I found it in my actual backyard makes it special to me.. . I also find quite a few Engonoeras near me - usually small but decently preserved - I am fairly certain it is from the Glen Rose Formation: Another nice little section from a different spot, also Glen Rose: Best one, however, was from Harker Heights (which is a bit over an hour away) in the Walnut Formation: That'll do for now. More to come in the near future!

Last Autumn, I took a side trip to Graf, Iowa in search of it's "elusive" cephalopods. Fortunately for me, a large piece of rock had released itself from the overhanging cliff and I proceeded to use my sledge hammer on it until broken into eight 50 lb pieces. This then was loaded into my truck without further exploration as I knew, each chunk contained maybe 50 cephalopods within it. These chunks of matrix were to provide me with a little winter entertainment while the landscape of Minnesota remained white. Two weeks ago I began splitting these boulders, looking for the treasures contained within. At the same time, @Ludwigia posted an image of belemnites , that made me think how similar his finds were to cephalopods of Graf. <img src='http://www.thefossilforum.com/uploads/gallery/album_1563/gallery_2384_1563_281093.jpg' alt='Acrocoelites (Acrocoelites) gracilis (Hehl in Zieten) ?' title='Acrocoelites (Acrocoelites) gracilis (Hehl in Zieten) ?' data-role='theImage'> After complimenting him on his finds, he asked to see my hash plates of Isorthoceras sociale. It is for this reason that I have put a trip report together. This location continues to perplex me a bit. How so many cephalopods over such a long period of time could keep collecting here. From my understanding, Graf, Iowa back in the Ordovician period was a very shallow marine environment where wave action altered how these cephalopod carcasses were deposited. Due to the wave action, many examples of one cephalopod being washed inside the shell of another cephalopod exist. This is very unique!! The septa of these creatures were thin and broke down readily in the surf, leaving space for other cephalopod shells to be deposited within. To show this better, here is a specimen that had all of it's septa dissolved, but the siphuncle still remained!!! Another picture showing the decayed cephalopod with remnants of a siphuncle yet no septa This I understand. But from my perspective, there are several odd factors that defy explanation from my limited knowledge with regard to the cephalopod deposition in Graf. The most prominent cephalopod rich rock is a bit orangish in color, as can be seen above. But there are 2 separate grey/brown zones that the specimens look completely different. First is an area where the cephalopods are flattened like pancakes. If you notice, the gastropods (circled) contain no distortion/ flattening. A mystery to me. The second darker zone contains cephalopods that are very small in comparison to the orange zone. They reach only about10 -20% of the "normal" size of Isorthocerus socialis found in the orange zone. A different species? Or a stress environment where they just didn't grow well? Obviously the matrix changed, so then should their environment have changed. An unknown mystery again for me.

Hi all, Here are some fossils I found at this summer in Carniol, and I would like to know what they are. If the species can be said that would be fantastic. So, the fossils are all from Carniol, France. They are from the "Gargasian", of the Aptian stage of the Cretaceous, some 120'000 years old. Looks like they're all pyrite-replaced. I believe they're some kind of cephalopods, but I'm really not sure. What are your thoughts? Thanks in advance! Max

Monday was Labor Day, a holiday. I was going to be off work and home alone. I woke up early for a day off really motivated to get up and get out to the North Sulfur River (NSR), but I was feeling a bit lazy. I didn’t want to wear myself out too much. I am on call all week and being worn out isn’t a good way to start being on call if you have to stay up all night working. I had not been out to the NSR since June, because I nearly did myself in last trip with heat exhaustion. I had plenty of fluids, but the 100 degree heat with no shade was too much for me. Anyway, the weather on Monday was pretty decent. The heat was bearable. Rain was in the forecast. There was a tropical storm spinning off inland and we were having storms from that. I got ready and drove the 1:20 minutes to my favorite bridge outside of Ladonia. I arrived about 9:00. Rain was predicted to start about 11:00. I didn’t know how bad it would be or how long it would last. So, I figured I had about 2 hours to get some hunting in. Entering the NSR can be a challenge along most of the section of river which was channeled back in the early 1900s. The banks are about 30 feet high and mostly vertical. Normally I enter from the south side of the bridge, but it seems everyone I know who goes there enters from the north side. I thought I’d try that entrance for once. I parked my car along a narrow path next to the guardrail near the bridge. I got out and got my gear ready. Before putting on my pack I walked out to the edge of the precipice of the bank and looked down to the riverbed 30 feet below. To my left was the bridge. I saw a ridiculously steep (80 degrees) path, if you could call it that, plummeting down into the river. I thought “No way! You’ve got to be kidding me!!!” It looked more like a wash and going down it would be more like falling or repelling if I had a rope. There was no way I could come back up that with a 40-50 pound pack. Plus I didn’t have a rope with me. Hum, maybe I need to add rope to my NSR gear list. I am not a rock climbing type girl. I am around a soft 50% marshmallow consistency. There isn’t a whole lot of muscle on me. I am all adventure and no brawn. This is a picture of the river from the top of the bank. IT is not the best pic, but you get the idea that it is a long way down. You can't really see the wash, but it starts behind the pillar on the left and runs behind that bush straight down to the bottom. I turned to walk back to my car and drive over to my usual entrance, but as I turned I saw an opening in the dense undergrowth. I walked towards it. There was a rope tied to a tree at the top of the hill. It was strung downhill and attached to another sapling 20 feet below. It wasn’t much of a rope, less than 1 cm thick with infrequent, small knots of maybe 1 cm in size. They would not be much to grab onto. It would help getting down for sure and it looked strong enough, but man was it steep (60 degreeish)!! It was really steep for about 20 feet or so and then leveled off for a bit and then there was some concrete rubble in the wash that ran along the path. From the level area you had to drop down about 3 feet and then walk the rubble to the riverbed. There was only one sizeable (2 inches) sapling to grab at or break your fall with on the 20 foot part. There were numerous saplings and a poison ivy vine that were ¼- ½ inch thick. There was a rebar type stake sticking up about 8 inches from the ground maybe 5 feet down the hill, I assume for a foothold of sorts. It looked like someone had tried to notch some steps into the hill with a shovel every 3 feet or so, but they were eroded so barely of any use anymore. I think I must be crazy, or ridiculously overdue for an adventure. It has been 3 months since I’d been to the NSR after all. I decided to go ahead and try it. I hoped I would not live to regret my choice. I went and got my pack, which was already about 15 pounds with my 4 pound sledge hammer, rock hammer, drinking fluids, my 40 caliber pistol (protection from wild hogs) and other gear. I put my pack on and walked to the edge of the hill. I took one step and slid. I was wearing tennis shoes with only a little tread. I turned around, went back to my car and put on my hiking boots. I tried going down the hill facing forward, but couldn’t do it. So I turned around and grabbed the rope and wrapped it around my hand and began to lower myself down backwards. In retrospect I can see I clearly did not think my exit strategy out. I will post another part in a couple minutes..

Hi all, Here is one of the Aconoceras nisus ammonites I found in Carniol, prepped. Now unfortunately the center is gone Luckily... it has some incredible sutures! They are very nicely visible, and give the ammonite a really cool look IMO. The real reason for the sutures to be so clear is actually because there is still a bit of clay in between the suture lines. So to be perfectly honest, that means that the prep isn't 100% complete. But I'm purposefully gonna leave it as it is, because this way the wonderful really stand out. Pyrite ammonite Aconoceras nisus Carniol, France "Gargasian", Aptian, Cretaceous (120 my) Found 22/7/2018

Found this that I believe is a cephalopod today at a devonian spot with imported material, I haven't seen a cephalopod with a bulbed tip before so I am not sure if it's some sort of pathology of a species or it's own species.

I have something of a cephalopod hash plate from the Britton Formation in Collin County Texas that I am working on. I don’t have great tools and so I’m prepping this completely manually, by hand. It has a layer of pyrite that is pretty tough to work with by hand. I am wondering, could I use Iron Out to soften or remove the pyrite without doing harm to the fossils or the cohesiveness of the plate? If so what would be the best way and dilution to use it at? These are pics of the little plate. I consider this the bottom. You can see the thin gray layer here and there. I’ve been slowly chipping away at it. Maybe I could brush Iron Out just on the spots of pyrite. This is the top. It has a bunch of little ceholopods on it. There is a mix of heteromorphs, baculites and ammonites along with some tiny, adorable gastropods. This pic it is partly wet, but the pyrite is covered with a red mud on the left half and top half of the plate. The bottom is a bit easier to work with since the cephalopods aren’t packed like sardines as they are on the top side. I can probably get rid of most of it on the bottom without too much damage, but the top is another matter.

Hi there! I'm a botanist who bought a cool ammonite at a rock show as a present for a friend. I ended up keeping it, and have since gotten quite a few others. I'm interested in getting better at identifying ammonites and joined this forum because there don't seem to be many ammonite ID resources available, and I am itching to figure out some of my mystery specimens. I am also planning a trip to the high desert east of the Sierra Nevadas to look at wildflowers and fossil beds next spring and would love some recommendations.

OK I thought the other two trip posts were getting a bit long. So I am creating separate post for the third trip for the Britton Formation in Collin county, Texas. The other 2 trips are here: I have to write these things in segments. I'm slow at writing sometimes since I write in between chores and such (i.e. other fossil hunting trips). Sunday I had a bit of time to work on writing the rest of the trip report. I was supposed to teach a couple scout badges this weekend outdoors, but wouldn’t you know it, it started raining. I thought I’d go hunting instead because the showers looked isolated, but when I looked at the radar future cast it looks like it will be raining much of the day across the whole area I usually hunt in. So I’ll work on writing the third segment between chores and cleaning fossils. I get so easily distracted. Here it is Tuesday and I'm just getting to post it I made a third trip out to the same spot with the Britton formation in the same week. Joe aka @Fruitbat and I had met at a local Mexican restaurant for dinner on Tuesday, I think it was. We live reasonably close to one another. When I met him for dinner I brought him a couple little slabs and a concretion of carboniferous plant fossils to play with. They were from my trip to Oklahoma at the end of April. During dinner we agreed to go hunting Saturday afternoon, provided I didn't get called in during the night and would be too wiped out to go hunting. I had told Joe I prefer to split the bill and pay for our own meals. He told me that his mother would roll over in her grave if he let me do that. I told him we would talk about that at dinner, trying to hold my ground. We did talk about it, but Joe is stubborn. While I was busy telling a story or talking or something the bill came and he took the bill before I thought to grab it and he paid for both anyway. I think I will either have to be quicker to grab the check or not go to dinner again unless the terms are agreed to up front. Am I being too modern or stubborn? I don't think so, but I am not a guy and I don't get how men think on these matters. I am trying to be practical and fair. I think its a generational gap. Joe is old enough to be. . . , well, lets just say older so as to not give his age away. I go to church on Saturday and the place is only 10-15 minutes away from my church. So the plan was I would go to church and then he would meet me up in a store parking lot near the spot we were going to hunt and we would go hunting from there. I was on call for my work. I have to stay within an hour’s drive of work at all times when I’m on call. I also have to have cell phone service wherever I go so my work can contact me. Believe it or not there are places within an hour of Dallas that I cannot get service at times. So this spot was as good as any I knew of within an hour of my work and I had great cell service there. I met up with Joe and we headed out to a construction dirt pile I wanted to check out first. I had seen it on the way to the spot last time. It was enormous. It was also part of the Eagle Ford group and probably less than 2 miles from the other spot. Sometimes I’ve found great stuff in construction piles. Sometimes they are complete duds. I'd classify this one a dud. This is a picture of the location. It was dirt taken from a new housing development right next to it. The soil was brown and there were a few plates of what appeared to be Kamp Ranch here and there, but the plates were pretty much compressed shell fragments. I'm still learning my formations. Been there, done that before. I knew there were better things waiting a couple of miles away, but I thought I would give the pile the once over anyway, just in case some gem of a fossil showed up. I guess I should have known that brown soil was probably not the best indicator for good fossils within the Eagle Ford. Maybe elsewhere. If anyone knows of brown soil in the Eagle Ford that has good fossils I'd like a little enlightening of what I might expect to find in it should I encounter brown soil in the Eagle Ford again so I don't completely discount and avoid it. I found numerous chunks of calcite and gypsum. There was the very rare very worn oyster and I found a few fragments of septarian nodules with the typical brown and yellow to white aragonite and calcite crystals in them, but these were pretty tumbled and worn down and not freshly broken open. After looking around for maybe 30 minutes we both decided that was enough of that. We headed out to the other location. We parked our vehicles. It was another blazing hot day. I had to convince Joe to bring something to drink. I was ready to put an extra Gatorade into my bag for him if he wasn't going to take one for himself. So he put one in his bag thankfully. It was over 90 degrees F. If you have read my other posts you know the issues with hydration I have had. I'm trying to turn over a new leaf. Plus the creek water out there didn't look quite so drinkable as the NSR water. That was sarcasm. The NSR is not so drinkable at all. I've come across places numerous times where you could tell the wild hogs had relieved themselves in the river by the smell. I still need to get me one of those Lifestraws. I digress. Back to the trip. We started the walk to the spot. This time I brought my rubber creek boots. They are the kind you get from Home Depot that the concrete pourers use when pouring concrete. So they can handle a creek pretty well, but they are a bit hot. We got to the place where the avalanche had happened and Joe wanted to explore the little creek below where the avalanche had happen. The small creek ran along the road. I can't remember if I mentioned that there were a few trees along the creek that had been taken down by beavers. One was one of the largest trees I've ever seen taken down by a beaver. It must have been over 12 inches in diameter. It made me wonder how many beavers died in felling trees. Within the creek there were some areas the water was shallow and the banks were high with lots of exposed rock and soil. I had explored it before. We didn’t really find anything other than the non-Cretaceous oysters. Just as we were about to the other creek where the hunt would begin I got a message from my work giving me a heads up that there was a deceased donor sample coming in for a pediatric, 2 month old heart transplant. I would need to go and work on that when they knew the ETA. I can't remember if I have ever posted my profession. I work in a lab and am a Histoccompatibility and Immunogenetics Specialist. I specialize in tissue typing for organ and bone marrow transplants and also for disease associations with the tissue typing. I have been doing that for 21 years in the same lab. Anyway, my work didn’t have the ETA yet they were just giving me advance notice. It had already been delayed twice. I was pretty hot and so bright I couldn't read my messages on my phone. So I found a shady spot to be able to read my messages. I sat down on the edge of a concrete slab poured to prevent erosion. It was a peaceful little place with the water running over the rocks. A tree was perched on the edge of the bank above me. I snapped this pic of Joe while I was sitting there reading my messages, replying and waiting for the response. We went on hunting while I waited to hear back on the ETA of the heart donor's tissue. Joe was the first to find something. He found a pretty little red ammonite about 1.5 inches across with a bit of matrix still on it. It was probably less than 30 feet from where Joe is in this pic. He offered it to me. I told him no way that it was his little memento of the hunt. If he found nothing else worthy of keeping that little beauty was worthy of keeping. I didn't get a pic of it. Maybe Joe can provide one. We continued with the hunt. I am not fast about covering ground while hunting, but I definitely move faster than Joe. Shortly after we got into the creek and began to hunt I got a call from the on call supervisor at my work telling me that the sample would be there around 6:00. That meant I had maybe 45 minutes left to hunt. We’d only been in the creek maybe 10 minutes max. Since I knew my time hunting would be cut short I was trying to cover more ground. I soon left Joe inspecting an exposure and moved on to another exposure further down the creek. I found a number of ammonite fragments. I found several halves of ammonites. Here are a few of them. The two ammonite halves were within 1 inch of each other along with the baculite fragment. I assume they are both Metoicoceras of some kind. Please chime in if you know what they are. I think this one must be a Placenticeras pseudoplacenta var. occidentale. Please help educate me if I am misidentifying them. I am very new at this. Sometimes I assume a species based on what I know is in the formation if it kind of looks like it. I am doing that with this one. I don't know of another smooth genus in the Britton. I also found a few more interesting bulbous concretion. Almost all of the concretion material are flat little slabs of rock not more than ½ to 1 inch thick, but occasionally you find little odd shaped ones or bumpy ones. I picked some of them up hoping I can figure out how to expose whatever may be inside. I found a few more baculite pieces. I found the longest fragment I had found. I also found a few tiny gastropods. Very cute and tiny. Here are pics of all the baculite fragments found over the 3 days. I am probably not the idea naturalist for combining the fossils from 3 hunts within a week from the same local. The largest fragment I did find when I hunted with Joe. This is one of the fragments. When it is wet it looks like shiny copper. When dry it looks like a metallic rose gold. It is lovely piece. I have a few others that have flecks of it on them. A few have a rainbow kind of hue. OK I am trying to break up my posts for this trip so I can include more pictures. Bare with me. More is coming. Oops left out a pic description. These are a number of the fragments I found that day with the exception of the Placenticeras ones.

Despite the foreboding weather prediction, the conditions for the spring gathering of TFF members at Deep Springs Road quarry was nearly ideal; sunny and pleasantly cool in the morning and when the rain finally did arrive in early afternoon it was only light and intermittent. Kane had announced to us he was traveling across the border from Ontario, accompanied by his wife, Deb, and member of the month, Jay (Devonian Digger). Members from New York, PA., Connecticut, and Massachusetts wanting to meet them and collect at a great spot gathered there. Deep Springs Road is the easternmost exposure of the Middle Devonian Hamilton Group's Moscow Formation's Windom Shale, the same formation exposed at Penn Dixie where Jay work and collects. But the fauna at Deep Springs Road is entirely different. Corals are nearly absent. Bivalves are extremely abundant. Species such as the large trilobite Dipleura dekayi which are very rare at Penn Dixie are common here. Every rock has the potential to reveal the gems of this rich and diverse fauna. Oh, and by the way, thanks largely to Kane and Jay's and Darktooth Dave's prodigious efforts a massive amount of rock was moved. In the picture, left to right-Kane's wife Deb, Jay, Mike (Pagurus) and his wife, Leila. Above them- Kane. On the far right, Tim (Fossildude19).

Hi Folks. Anxious for the rain to quit so I can start digging again. Took a walk through the garden patches and picked these up today after several nice "rinsing" rains". I hope to find more of the bryozoan plates, maybe more larger ones. Maybe you can see more than one variety in the attached pics. More to come .... I'm hoping. Kind regards,

Three Mondays in April and May, 4/25, 5/9, and 5/16/16 this writer explored a small privately owned quarry north of Morrisville, NY., Madison County. Exposed was the Mottsville Member of the Oatkacreek Formation which represents the uppermost part of the Marcellus Shale which is the lowermost part of the Hamilton Group (Middle Devonian). A pic of the site showing an area excavated by this writer:

Two weeks ago while I was at the ESCONI Fossil / Mineral Show, I bid on and won a great little piece of rock that was identified as Isorthoceras sociale Cephalopods from the Upper Ordovician - Maquoketa Formation of Graf, Iowa. I did a little research before heading out to the MAPS Show yesterday and decided on my way back home, I would take a 1 1/2 hour detour to Graf and see if I could find this small road cut. I have to admit that this approximately 300 ft long road cut contains what must be some type of mass Nautiloid death bed. There are so many of them that you will for sure go home with your fair share if you ever get a chance to visit the very out of the way place that is hidden among farmland. I will give a couple warnings for this location- there is no shoulder to park on and you have to drive on the grass/dirt area that is muddy. Secondly, people have under cut these Nautiloid beds and there are TONS of rocks above your head in sections of this road cut; It is not a place for young kids nor a place for a Risk Taker. Besides the Isorthoceras sociale that I found, I also found a couple nice Gastropods. This is a place that I will not visit again since I did collect enough loose pieces and blocks that I found around the area. Here are some pics of the area as well as some of my finds:

Inspired by my friend, Darktooth, Dave and his recent exploits at Deep Springs Road quarry I decided due to a favorable weather report on Monday to visit my favorite site for the for first time in 2018. I woke up Monday morning to an inch of snow in the Hudson Valley. Headed north on the Thruway to Albany through more snow, then west, finally on Route 20. About hallway there, the sky cleared and the snow covering reduced to patches. After a three and a half hour trip I arrived at Deep Springs Road. True to Dave's word, the site was completely snow free. The temp was in the mid 40s, sunny and warm enough that later in the day I was removing my outerwear. Deep Springs Road quarry is the eastern most exposure of the Windom Shale, the Moscow Formation which lies at the top of the Hamilton Group- which is also the top of the Middle Devonian. It is the same formation exposed at Penn Dixie. What is notable about this site is the biodiversity- at least 20 species of brachiopods, more than 20 species of bivalves, at least 5 species of gastropods, plus cephalopods, trilobites, phyllocarids, plants, etc. Dave's recent excavation left me a lot of rock to split which took up most of my day. I did my own excavation as well. Here are some of my finds: My favorite find of the day- the largest Spyroceras nautiloid I've found at the site so far. A Cimitaria recurva, a bivalve in 3D. Pholadella radiate, another bivalve.

Shedding new light on the evolution of the squid University of Bristol, February 28, 2017 https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170228222814.htm The paper is: Tanner, A.R., Fuchs, D., Winkelmann, I.E., Gilbert, M.T.P., Pankey, M.S., Ribeiro, Â.M., Kocot, K.M., Halanych, K.M., Oakley, T.H., da Fonseca, R.R. and Pisani, D., 2017, March. Molecular clocks indicate turnover and diversification of modern coleoid cephalopods during the Mesozoic Marine Revolution. In Proc. R. Soc. B (Vol. 284, No. 1850, p. 20162818). The Royal Society. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1850/20162818 PDF files: https://curis.ku.dk/ws/files/180602001/Tanner_2017_Molecular_clocks.pdf http://b3.ifrm.com/30233/130/0/p3002384/Molecular_clocks_indicate_turnover_and_diversification_of_modern_coleoid_cephalopods_during_the_Mesozoic_Marine_Revolution.pdf http://static-curis.ku.dk/portal/files/180602001/Tanner_2017_Molecular_clocks.pdf A related paper is: Clements, T., Colleary, C., De Baets, K. and Vinther, J., 2017. Buoyancy mechanisms limit preservation of coleoid cephalopod soft tissues in Mesozoic Lagerstätten. Palaeontology, 60(1), pp. 1-14. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/earthsciences/people/jakob-vinther/pub/94029132 PDF files: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/efc5/e8c2e2e3eda2561feb1e4234afe2b7a4e254.pdf https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312524043_Data_from_Buoyancy_mechanisms_limit_preservation_of_coleoid_cephalopod_soft_tissues_in_Mesozoic_Lagerstatten_Dryad_Digital_Repository https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kenneth_De_Baets https://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/files/107708089/Clements_et_al_2017_Palaeontology.pdf Yours, Paul H.

Last Monday, February 5th I had the privilege of touring the New York State Museum's enormous fossil collection with the state paleontologist, Lisa Amati. The collection is stored in three rooms on the third floor of the State Education Building in Albany in the same building that contains the New York State Museum. Right now, only a few fossils are displayed in the State Museum which is primarily historical and social in focus. In the lobby is this slab which contains dozens of Middle Devonian starfish- Devonaster.

Ordovician Galena Formation SE MN A couple of weeks ago I met with Dave and took him out on a fossil hunt and sold him some maps of various fossil sites. We did well that day, but yesterday he showed up at my door with some fossils he found and some of these are terrific! He definitely has an eye for trilos! :-D And these cephs are huge! I snapped some quick shots as he is having trouble posting. #1 #2 #3 #4 Some great cephs and gastropods! A slice of a big horn coral OR??? Thanks for looking and any IDs you may have on these! :-D Any thoughts on IDs would be appreciated!

Back at the end of 2015 I posted about an Early Christmas present...went hunting on a ridiculously warm Christmas Eve at a roadcut near an exit on I75 between Dayton and Cincinnati. Found some Flexiycalymene trilobites, RafInesquinas, and Cephalopods - Orthocones. That spring I went to the other side of the highway and found some more of the same plus these trilobites: I then decided that I would visit each of the roadcuts between the I675 and the I275 interchanges. This has taken me until this past May...about a year. The one closest to Dayton was pretty disappointing. I picked up a few nice Strophemans, a RafInesquina, a partial Leptaena, and a few brachs (right of the coin below) I was unable to identify...there were a ton of those. I went back to the initial interchange but went to the exits at the south end. Google maps said it was about 70 feet lower than the north exit ramps I was not expecting what I found.... It was a Vinlandstrophia Ponderosa mecca. Both sides of the highway as it turned out. Here are some from one side. The other side had nearly as many. Some broken and showing nice geode centers Along with a nice array of Orthocones, RafInesquinas, Gastropods and even a few Horn Corals. I've never found horn corals along side the Vinlandstrophia Ponderosas. The next stop, slowly getting closer to Northern Cincinnati, was a very exciting spot not only Cephalopods and RafInesquinas but some unexpected Flexicalymene trilobites: Including the largest "roller" I've ever found (2 views)...As big as a quarter. I had to prep it as soon as I got home. As I got to the last roadcut before I275 I didn't know what to expect. No 2 consecutive were the same. Even the same exit was different at north and south.