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At the end of August this year I travelled to Larvik in southern Norway to visit "Norges stein og mineralmesse". On my drive from Nässjö in Småland to Strömstad in Bohuslän i took a short detour to visit Taberg. Taberg is a huge iron ore mountain consisting of Titanomagnetite-Ovlivinite which is only found in Taberg, Sweden and Rhode island, U.S.A. The ore body was created 1.2 billion years ago and has survived both a number of ice ages as well as several attempts of mining. Today the mountain is protected by law and during winter the old mine shafts house hundreds of bats. Being Smålands fifth highest peak it makes for a great view of lake Vättern. Further up north I made a short stop at Femstenaberg. This rest area is found just before the exit to Skee and is only accessible if travelling north on the E6 towards Oslo. Right next to the toilets are the subfossil remains of a Balaena mysticetus that was found 72 metres above today's sea level, during the construction of the new E6 highway. The remains are dated through the C14 method to be around 14000 years old. Subfossil vertebrates are quite rare in Sweden, as far as i know you won't find one exhibited outside of a museum anywhere in Sweden except here. As the day was nearing its end I took the ferry from Strömstad to Sandefjord and got to enjoy the sun setting over the Oslo fields Syenites and Monzonites.

This year's second hunt was successful, considering the snow. There is still a bit of snow covering some places. I was still lucky enough to find some ok fossils. The area where I found these trilobites is called fossildalen/fossilvalley in slemmestad (i`ve showed pictured from the area before). The fossils here in the area stem from the time periods of Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian, a period of 541 million to 419 million years ago. At that time, Slemmestad was a seabed in a relatively shallow sea. The trilobites fossils I found are about 420 million years old I believe. I found around 10 trilobites or parts of them.