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Hi all! At last Friday’s Dry Dredgers meeting, I handed over the two Ordovician fossils below to Dr. Carl Brett for the Cincinnati Museum Center! Standard business card for scale. This coral, which I have wrongly been identifying as Favosites sp., is from the campus of Hanover College in Indiana, in their Dr. Daryl Karns trail system. This was donated with permission from the Hanover College Geology Faculty. This Treptoceras sp. comes from the US-68 road cut in Maysville, KY, Kope Formation.

A couple weeks ago during a collecting trip down to the Cincinnati area, I spent half a day collecting at the big roadcut near Maysville, KY. It's really hard to describe just how big this roadcut is. Pictures don't do it justice, but here's one anyways. For reference, the pine trees are probably 3 meters tall or so. I spent all my time collecting in the Fairview Formation. In the picture above, the contact between the Fairview and the underlying Kope Formation occurs near the first bench. The contact with the overlying Bellevue Limestone is just above the third bench. It really helps to study literature on this site before visiting, it's very overwhelming and it's harder to have success without knowing what to look for. I didn't collect too much but was happy with my finds. Plectorthis fissicosta A variety of bryozoans, including the blade-shaped Escharopora falciformis towards the bottom The dumbbell-shaped burrow Diplocraterion The rare bryozoan Graptodictya perelegans The most exciting find was the rare trilobite Ceraurus milleranus. Unfortunately it's weathered and I'm not confident that much more is hiding under the matrix, but I'll probably have it prepped at some point to be sure. To the upper left is a Ceraurus hypostome, not sure if it's from this individual or not. In the future I'd like to dedicate a whole day to this site. I've visited twice so far and still barely explored any of it. If you ever have the chance, definitely check it out.

I found this strange specimen in the Upper Ordovician Fairview Formation outside of Maysville, KY. The thing attached to the donut looks like it could be a crinoid holdfast, but if so I can't recall having seen a similar one from the Cincinnatian. But what might the donut be? A large trace fossil? A strange sedimentary structure? I really have no idea, I've never seen anything similar before.

With the mild December weather, I decided to squeeze in one more collecting trip before the end of the year. I contacted a few friends and we hopped in the car and made a six hour trek from the Chicagoland area down to Northern Kentucky. We decided to collect a huge roadcut outside of Maysville Kentucky. The cut is well known to collectors of Cincinnatian aged fossils. Many beautiful crinoids, edrioasteroids and other rare Ordovician fauna have been found at this site. The cut is enormous and is quite overwhelming to a first time collector. I have not done much collecting in the Cincinnatian but had had a chance to briefly visit this site once before and it looked promising. The site cuts through several formations of the Cincinnatian. From bottom to top, it exposes the Kope, Fairview and Bellevue Formations. My main goal was to hopefully find a rare edrioasteroid. We initially concentrated on the upper layers in the Bellevue. We had already had some luck earlier in the day with echinoderms. We had stopped at a smaller cut on our way to the site that exposed the Kope Formation. My friend found 2 nice slabs with well preserved examples of the Crinoid Ectenocaris with stems and calyx’s preserved. Unfortunately, we did not have much luck locating any Edrioasteroids. I decided to head down the cut and do a little prospecting in the Fairview. Almost immediately, I stumbled upon my best find ever in the Cincinnatian! I was looking at pieces of shale when I was stunned to see a slab covered in trilobites! For those who have not collected in the Cincinnatian, finding any trilobites other then Flexicalymene and Isotelus is a rare occurrence. A collector is likely to only find isolated parts of some of the rarer types. The trilobites that you do find are normally individuals and likely enrolled. After closer inspection, I was amazed to see that the trilobites that were preserved on this slab appeared to be examples of Ceraurus milleranus! All appear to be prone and some are even piled on top of each other. Finding one complete Ceraurus in the Cincinnatian would be considered an amazing and very rare find. In all, we collected over twenty in various stages of growth ranging from a tiny 1/4 inch example to one nearly two inches in length. The slabs need to be cleaned and prepped but I am attaching a picture of one of the unfinished pieces. I will add more pictures to this post once everything is prepped. We found some other nice fossils that day that I will post as well.

Is anyone going to the Belgrade Quarry in Maysville, NC this Friday? If so, do you have any info or tips? I actually read that it was open to the public this Friday 01/06 on the North Carolina Fossil Club page. I tried reaching out but haven't heard anything back yet via email. Thanks in advance! Holly