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It's been several years since I've last posted. Had a bit of run-in with a medical issue that took me offline for awhile. I seem to be doing better and have been able to complete a daylong ramble in the local hills albeit at 70% of my former capacity. This trip is in the Sacramento Mountains and covers the hike into the Mississippian Lake Valley (MLV) Formation, specifically the Nunn Formation for collecting. The MLV is the last of the formations in the Mississippian locally. After that I ascended into the lower Pennsylvanian known as the Gobbler Formation here. The two Covid years + my own medical issue brought about a lot of negative trailhead access issues. The detours around these now restricted areas add to the hike length sometimes quite measureably. Once into the distant hills away from humanity things look much brighter. The following is a shot back into town and the White Sands National Park (thin white strip in the distance). I'm standing on the Nunn Formation of the Mississippian Lake Valley Formation. If you can't find a crinoid, horn coral or spirifer here you simply are not trying. A couple of crinoid hash slabs picked off the ground. There are plentiful root and stem pieces but intact calyxes are difficult to find and usually quite small (15mm).

I was out exploring a very narrow area adjacent to an exposed upper Mississipian formation here. About 100 yards uphill and perhaps 100 ft elevation gain above that Mississippian formation I was hoping to find permineralized material. For perhaps close to 2 hours I was only finding things like this calamite impression and this either highly hematite rich remnant or possibly burnt material I then managed to find a small area that wasn't heavily overgrown with vegetation and found some permineralized material + some unknowns. This is a piece of permineralized material with unknown #1 Unknown #1. Update---I 'think' it is the pith of a cordaites wrapped around a quartz sandstone fill, much like a taco. Another side view The quartz sandstone filling An end view pic is just a thin dark wrapping with quartz filling the inside. Any ideas on unknown #1? Cordaites Artisia?

Hello, this specimen is from an excursion in search of permineralized material in the upper formations of the lower Pennsylvanian Gobbler formation. In this particular formation I have found Psaronius and various Lycopsids, calamites&piths, etc. This is fairly weathered specimen in quartz sandstone, but the diamond pattern does not seem typical of Lepidodendron. Each 'diamond' seems more like a square. There appear to be 2 separate layers of diamond shaped material so these might be smaller branches toward the crown of a Lycopsid. The upper one is more complete in appearance. The lower one seems to have an additional overlay of material. Dimension of the upper one is 25 mm wide and 125mm long approx. Suggestions are most welcome.

Hi, I believe this is a pelecypod. It was found in an early Pennsylvanian formation sandstone hash plate. Specimen is 3" overall. Would anyone have some thoughts to which superfamily, genus, etc., so I can dig a little deeper on my own? Thank you, Kato

Apologies, I was out looking for other kinds of permineralized material today and just as I was leaving the search area I found this sliver of material. For some reason I just can't get a good pic of it to convey the material better. I do hope to get back there to search for more material but my thought is this is fern. Maybe I need to get a bit more daylight and a little further away. 2.5" length, 1" width, 3/4" tall