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Over the winter holidays I took advantage of the time I had off from work to go on a nine-day fossil collecting road trip through Mississippi and Alabama. Last week, while collecting at an exposure of the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Prairie Bluff Chalk in Alabama, I stumbled upon a fragment of a cidarid echinoid with six associated plates. After some research that night from my hotel room did not provide an identification, I sent an email to George Phillips, the paleontology curator at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, asking for help. What I initially thought was just a cool find turned out to be one much more significant. In his email response, George told me that associated cidaroid plates are quite rare and that in the museum's entire collection, they have only two examples of plates attached as pairs. He said that until then he had never seen one more complete than the one I had found. He further explained that the common Maastrichtian cidaroid of the Gulf Coastal Plain had only been known from isolated plates and spines as either of two genuses and that he strongly believed that this specimen could be enough to finally identify the cidaroid to genus level. Given the importance of the find, I was happy to donate the specimen to George and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for further study and publication in a future paper on Maastrichtian echinoids of the Gulf Coastal Plain.

My family and I have recently made a few trips to Mussell Creek (Alabama), which contains the Prairie Bluff Chalk. This the is very end of the Cretaceous in Alabama. I have been told that in some places this formation shows evidence of the Chicxulub tsunami, though I do not know if this is visible at this site. In one of the pictures I am pointing a stick at the Prarie Bluff Chalk. Right above that is the Paleogene. We have found small shark teeth, urchins, coral, baculites and snails at the site, along with large amounts of shells, including some nice Exogyra (I think) oysters. Unfortunately, I don't have images of the fossils yet (they aren't super exciting, except that some of the Exogyra are really well preserved), but as you can see it is a truly beautiful site, and wading in the cool creek makes for some fun fossil hunting. My kids are all better fossil hunters than me....my youngest is insisting I get him a screen with 1/8 mesh so he won't miss any of the really tiny teeth! (how does he see them?)