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Last week I drove to Springfield, Illinois to visit some family I haven't seen in some time. Yesterday I had the whole day to myself, so I decided to venture off and drive 2 hours up to a popular fossiliferous roadcut around Oglesby, Illinois. Here is how it looked parked along the side of the road. I figured the site would be a bit overgrown and treacherous, but conditions weren't bad after getting past the first wall of foliage, besides the combination of heat and humidity. I decided to keep distance away from the weathering wall as much as possible. At certain spots, it looked very dangerous and very unstable. One slip or hit of a hammer could easily collapse a ton of rock. It was pretty easy to collect fossils and stay at a safer distance. There were a lot of nice brachiopods lose from weathering and from where others had been splitting rock. Lots of brachiopods infilled with crystal as well. Most of them where extremely fragile. With some care, you could extract some really nice specimens. A lot of the composita and productida brachiopods were infilled with crystal. I spent about 30 minutes flaking out this nice geodized productid brachiopod. Though most of my time was spent looking through the rubble. There was a ton of rock split up there, making it pretty easy for me to look through it all. Looking around after 15 minutes, I got excited. I thought I had found my first ever conulariid fossil! After a little spit shine and some magnification, I'm pretty confident it is indeed a conulariid fossil! Another 20 minutes passed, and my eye spotted some shiny tooth crown atop a rock. It looked to be some type of tooth. I usually don't like to hit rock with a tooth exposed like this because there is a good chance the tooth could shatter, or the rock could fracture in an unwanted way. The rock was too big and heavy, so I decided to chance it. Here it is under some magnification after trimming the rock. Most of the tooth is still buried in matrix, but I think it is likley this is a Peripristis tooth. Although that is just speculation until it gets cleaned up. This pretty small crusher toothplate was up next, sitting on top a decent sized rock. It looked like someone split it out and had just left it there. Maybe the covering stone just popped off and I got lucky though. My last find had me feeling accomplished. Finding a Peripristis tooth was the goal for this trip, and I did not leave disappointed. I have collected these teeth prior in Northwestern Missouri, but not here in Illinois. It's great to be able to collect one from elsewhere now. Unfortunately, some crown is missing off the tooth, but I am happy with the find. All said and done, this was a fun way to spend the afternoon.

Yesterday I went on a combined field trip with ESCONI and LOESS to the Starved Rock Clay Products pit in Utica, Illinois. ( @connorp was there too!) This open pit exposes the Pennsylvanian Mecca Quarry black shale, Francis Creek shale, Colchester Coal, and an underclay below the coal- an assembly of strata that have produced world-renowned fossils elsewhere, including Mazon Creek fossils further east and complete sharks from the Mecca Quarry Shale in Indiana. At this location, unfortunately, the concretions are almost all blanks but the black shale does produce isolated fauna including bivalves, brachiopods, cephalopods, and shark teeth and scales. The underclay also contains petrified and pyritized wood and root traces. About 30 of us gathered at a nearby McDonalds before heading to the pit- dark clouds on the horizon brought intermittent hard rain that kindly let up by the time we reached the pit floor. My interest for this trip was in the black shale, with hopes of finding shark material in particular. With the recent rains everything was muddy, and the black shale could be found in chunks strewn along the slumping highwall. Some folks were splitting the shale, but I did not have any luck with that-all of my finds were already exposed. The mud really made it hard to see whether or not there were fossils in the exposed black shale, but I was happy to be able to find a few pieces worth taking home- as often seems to be the case for me when fossil hunting, I found my best stuff in the first hour and virtually nothing the rest of the time I was there.

I need help identifying these, they are everywhere here in Marseilles but I don’t know what they are