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My apologies in advance for my verbosity. Sunday, October 18, 2015: The 4:15 am alarm went off, and I arose to find a dark, cold day before me. The weather websites had been predicting a balmy 39° high, and a 40% chance of snow showers. I was hoping we would end up in the 60% camp. My target today was the Deep Springs Road Quarry, in Earlville, NY. This was the site of a former Fossil Forum meet up, back in May of this year. The wealth and diversity of fossils at this site is enough to bring anyone back for more time to look for the various fossils that can be found there. After packing the appropriate food, water, and extra layers of clothes, and necessary coffee, ... I headed out on the road at 4:50 am. My plan was to get there between 9:00 and 9:30 am. Being a 4.5 hour drive for me from central Connecticut, I had hoped to be on the road by 4:30 am. My slow start had put me a bit behind schedule. Oh well. I was greeted on the highway be little to no traffic, and with some travelling tunes to get me pumped, I was on schedule in no time, keeping my speed to a respectable 68 MPH. Travelling early in the morning is one of my favorite things, and the solitude and anticipation of the day make for a great combination. The waxing crescent moon, along with a few stars visible from my window as I cruised down the Massachusetts Turnpike, made for an eerie expectancy. Soon enough, I was on my way through New York, passing Albany and heading to my destination. A quick gas fill-up in Schoharie, then a few changes in route, and I was on Rte. 20, heading west. I ended up passing numerous fossiliferous road cuts along the way, seeing the Cherry Valley outcrop, and proceeding along on my journey. It was about this time it started to flurry, with very light snow. OK, I can handle that. No problem. The sun was shining through the mostly cloudy skies, and I was hopeful of some decent, albeit cold collecting. It started getting darker by the time I reached Hamilton, NY. It started snow squalling. Driving through nearly white out conditions, with snow accumulating on the ground, my high spirits were fading. Don't get me wrong, ... I would show up and put in a valiant effort to hunt through these conditions,... but man, ...I was not looking forward to it. The further I went, the harder it snowed. Great. I was within 5 minutes of the site(according to the obnoxious GPS lady) , and I drove right out of the squalls, and into sunlight, and further visibility. YES! I arrived on site at around 9:12 am. Although cold, and with only a slight bit of snow on the ground, I was pleasantly surprised with the condition of the site. Whoo hoo! Show Time! I was the first one there. I had tried to get another meet up together, but with the poor weather predicted, and some family obligations, and other issues cropping up, the only people able to commit to making it were my good friends, JeffreyP, and Pagurus. (Mike) I got out, and with hat, fleece and gloves on, I proceeded to explore the quarry. I was pleased to hear the sound of a car coming about 10-15 minutes later. Jeff had arrived! We said our hellos, and talked a bit about his last visit to the site. He had an area in mind to hunt, and to remove rock from an outcrop. I was willing to help if he needed any assistance, but otherwise left him to it. I am more of a wandering site hunter; I like to move around, go through other's spoil piles, and split leftover shale and rubble. I am eager to cover as much of a site as I can, and make many good finds this way. We were hunting and finding some decent things. I had previously told Jeff that I was going to forego collecting any bivalves and brachiopods, to concentrate on trilobites, gastropods, goniatites, and hopefully some phyllocarids. The preservation of the fossils here, and variety, made a liar out of me. The bivalves and brachiopods weathered out nicely, and were so cool looking, I picked up a bunch anyway. Mike showed up at about this time. It was around 10:00 am. We took some time to say hello, and inquire about the trip from Massachusetts. We were back at it in a short time. It was shortly after that, when a guy dressed in camo, and wielding a bow, came walking up the street. He came up the drive to see what we were doing. I introduced myself, as did he. His name was Brandon, and he showed great interest for a 15 year old, in what we were finding. About 5 minutes later, a pickup truck pulled up, and the land owner popped out. He was unhappy to see Brandon's bow. He made his feelings known, and I explained that Brandon hadn't been hunting here, and he was looking in on our activites. The landowner told Brandon to leave or put the bow away. Brandon asked for a ride to his house, some 2 miles away. I agreed and we headed towards my car. The landowner made clear to us that he was more than happy to have us on his property to hunt fossils, as we break rock down to a usable size for whatever they use the crushed rock for. He just did not want people who had no permission to hunt on the land to be there. The misunderstanding settled, the land owner wished us luck and left. I asked Brandon as he was putting his stuff in my car, if he would like to stay and hunt with us. He had shown a fairly keen interest in what we were doing, so I asked. He looked surprised, and said sure. I got my extra hammer out of my car, and handed it to him. I showed him what I was doing, and answered his many questions about where we were from, what the fossils were, and how old, and many, many other things. Long story short, he ended up spending the entire day with us, bouncing back and forth between the 3 of us , learning about fossils. He didn't leave until his mom had come looking for him, around 4:00 PM. Throughout the day we all made some good finds, despite the fact that we had a few serious snow showers through the day, again, ... with the nearly white out squalls. Mike left a short while later, wanting to get back on the road for his 4 hour trip home. Jeff and I ended up staying until almost 6:00 pm, the sun heading towards the horizon, leaving long shadows on the ground. I said goodbye to Jeff, and wished him luck for the next day, as he was planning on staying the night in the area to do more hunting the next day. I had an uneventful trip home in the dark, and was home by 10:15 pm. Besides the sense of accomplishment from a fun and successful hunt, I ended the day knowing we had turned someone on to the joys of fossil hunting. Teaching in this way was the greatest part of the day for me. My better finds of the day are below. I invite the others to add their experiences to this epic. Enjoy! Thanks for reading. Regards,

This is an Ordovician Sea Bottom Display done by MinnBuckeye. He collected ALL of these fossils within the city limits of Rochester (!!!) during the summer of 2014 - and yes he works full time plus in a small town way outside of Rochester! It shows nearly all of the common fossils you can find in the Ordovician of southeast Minnesota with the exception of the Ordovician index fossil Maclurites. Incredible display, well done, needs to be shared and he shared with me how he did it! Which I will share with you as I consider this a wonderful display to create for teaching about Earth's history and fossils. Please be patient with me as this will take a reply or two, so I will note that with "Continued..." If you can't wait, just go to my blog. :-) You should be able to click on the pictures once or twice to enlarge them and get a better look, but I did reduce them to fit into fewer replies, didn't on the blog. Now for the closeups! Continued...

Last Saturday, 5/23/15, a group of Fossil Forum members from five different northeastern states gathered at a quarry off Deep Springs Road in Lebanon, NY. to hunt for Middle Devonian marine fossils in shale from the Moscow Formation. This writer first visited the site, featured on Karl Wilson's website, in late spring of 2013 and since has returned six times. Last fall I introduced Tim (Fossildude19) to the site and we came up with the idea that this would be an excellent location for a TFF meet up. Tim made the connections and plans with other TFF members, a date was finally agreed upon, and this writer went to the site on the weekend of 5/3-5/4/15 to check out the parking situation and to gain permission from the owner, a local farmer. Primary features of the site are the sheer abundance of fossils (There are fossils on just about every rock.) and biodiversity, just about every type of marine fossil from the Middle Devonian can be found there. The site differs from others further west, especially those in the Finger Lakes/Buffalo region in that it was much closer to the Catskill Delta to the east, therefore the waters were probably cloudier and the fossil assemblage different from those further west. Corals are rare and bivalves, gastropods, and cephalopods more abundant than those other sites in Western New York. The site is located amidst lovely rolling hills, and fields of corn and cows grazing. Many Amish live in the area. Weather that day; cloudless blue sky, temperatures in the low sixties, was perfect for collecting. Tim, from Connecticut was the first to arrive. Then I showed up, then Mike (Pagurus) and his wife, Leila from Massachusetts, then Rob (snakebite 6769) and his family from Vermont, Carmine (xonenine) from Buffalo, NY., and finally Dave (Shamalama) from the Philadelphia area. Here's a group shot taken by this writer.

After some serious heavy duty planning (it all came about last night) a bunch of us Canadians (Malcolm, Dave, Jim) are heading down to Penn Dixie tomorrow Saturday July 11. This is always a real treat, those of you who have "excavated" with us before will appreciate that we get a bit hard core when it comes to hunting the elusive trilobite multiple plate. Can't guarantee we will have out the big rock saws, that all depends on how busy they are at the Penn site , but we will definitely be moving some major amount of rock with our big pry bars...... If you are in the area please pop in and hunt with us for a bit,.... we can always use a strong back......... and the company...... Just look for the three that don't look like tourists and seem to have moved in for the day.... that will be us.... As usual I will likely have on my Jurassic park hat and Fossil Forum T-shirt.... Hope we see some of you there...... One of My Prepped Penn Dixie bugs.... At typical days Haul

Well got started consolidating and prepping some of the matrix we brought home from BCM. Here are a few bugs I have uncovered before air abrading. first three are the same bug.

Well to start of let me make this perfectly clear this post is not in anyway a negative review nor is it put down of Penn Dixie. It is absolutely one of my favorite places to go for a mad crazy day of collecting about three times a year. I am a multie year member there and have been for the last seven years and will continue to be as long as I am fit enough to do this crazy hobby. (Believe me I feel older and older every year but at least I am crazy enough to keep on doing it. Well the crazy Canadians (Jim, Dave, Malcolm) did one of their two or three annual trips to Penn Dixie yesterday. Wouldn't you know it none of us thought to bring a camera, so no pictures. But if you look up Penn Dixie from our trips on other years it looks basically the same, we are just one year older. We missed having Ludwigia from Germany with us (YES HE IS A CRAZY CANADIAN COLLECTOR) and our honorary Crazy collectors from the US Shamalama (Dave #2) and Carmine. Well Jim left his home at 3:00 AM , I left at 4:30 AM and Dave left at 6:00AM We all met up at the parking Wal-Mart parking lot near the Buffalo border crossing and loaded everything into Jim's van. We left the rock saws behind because we thought Penn would be very busy and you can't use them when people and small children are around. I did bring the heavy duty gas leaf blower though.....But we did have a ton of heavy duty pry bars sledges and other collecting gear. Well with me having a British passport the border crossing took the customary hour while I got photographed and finger printed (they do that every time). After our customary stop for Tim Horton's in the US we were the first to arrive at Penn Dixie at 9:00AM. Spent some time chatting with Stan and Dr. Bob at the front entrance before getting out to the dig area. Dr. Bob is still working hard at it at the age of 84, not moving quite as fast but still out their finding bugs every week. We made sure we pulled a few blocks out for him , looks like he found a couple of nice ones splitting them. No one else arrived till about 10:00. During the whole day perhaps we saw 30 to 40 other guests who were all in the definite first time collector with the family category. Let it be said we gave away a lot of partial trilos to the kids throughout the day. Disappointing that they get so few visitors on what was an absolutely sunny gorgeous 30 degree Celsius day. But I have heard that other days this summer they have had 300 guests so hopefully they are doing well overall. Here is the current problem with Penn Dixie for the serous collector. The trilobite layer(s) is typically well below the quarry floor in some paces as much as 4 or 5 feet. The trilobites are best found in a layer that is about one to two inches thick (phacops (I know that is no longer the correct name) and greenops) at the top of a section followed by about 12 to 16 inches of garbage underlined by about 4 inches of phacops. This phacops layer is basically at the natural water table line for the site. So expect to get wet and muddy if you want to be in the right spot. When Penn has their dig with the experts day they bring in a backhoe and trench down to the two layers and break out blocks of the good stuff with the backhoe for the collectors to bust up. By all reports this year the trench they created was not in the most productive location. Now here we are yesterday well after the trench being created and the trench is basically filled in. There is no exposures of any of the material that we are really looking for any more. The site really caters to families and safety is a paramount concern for them. For families with young children searching through small level rubble is definitely the way to go.... However not so good for the serious collector. Note to Penn you would get far more serious collectors if you had an area that was for the serious collectors that we could bench and work the seems. Collection in that area should be restricted to individuals that have the right tools and maintain a normal fossil collecting protocol for excavating a rich fossil bed layer by layer using a benching technique tossing the spoils away from where you are benching into the seem. Well as Crazy Canadians we will not be thwarted so we picked two promising areas and we trenched down ourselves to the correct layers and after about 5 hours of grueling work we had broken out about 20 blocks of the right stuff (well almost right stuff)weighing 200 to 600 pounds each. Our style is to break out large blocks till we are basically dead beat, then split those blocks for the rest of the day. Jim to his credited did not loose his cool when a family spent the afternoon splitting blocks that he had broken out. One very nice prone was definitely found in the blocks. So yesterday we broke out blocks till about 1:00 then we spent till 6:00 splitting these blocks looking for the elusive trilo. Shamalama or Ludwigia or Carmine or anyone else that has joined us over the years can attest to the method we use which turns out to be nothing more than hard back breaking labor. And what did you do on you vacation Malcolm, well I joined a chain gang under a merciless supervisor (Me) and broke big huge blocks of rock for ten hours...... This method works extremely well at Penn and is the best way to have any chance of finding multiple complete trilobite plates. The very best material for these plates tends to be right at the water table line in a grey matrix above a layer that is much more shalely and provides a natural break point below the block. You can find domes at this contact layer that will sometimes have 3 to 20 trilobites clustered together... Ludwigia(Roger) found a great one of these a few years back at Penn. He has a post on it here on the forum.... Why did I say almost the right stuff, well the layer we were in was only splitting out blocks about 14 inches thick, the best blocks are about two feet thick. We are definitely at a section where the productive layer is papering off on an incline to the North. Hence the material is no where near as rich as the material we were into at Penn two and three years ago. We so what did we find..... Jim had a frustrating day. His back flared up about 2:00 and he had to go into slow mode. I guess I worked him too hard breaking out the blocks all morning. I do not have any pictures of his haul but he did a lot of grumbling about not finding anything but by my count he probably has about ten pieces of rock in his wagon all with the potential to have complete trilos in them. I suspect a lot of you would be quite happy with 10 trilos on a day. Jim jump into this post and let us know what you really found. Dave... he is a bit of a laid back collector and uses his zen to summon the bugs to him. Dave only takes home bugs he believes to be complete. He was giving away all his partials to the kids..... He gave me 7 to prep for him and from what I can see they are all complete. Here is the picture of his little haul that he gave me to prep.. These will prep up real nice..... I will try to take some pictures once they get prepped. I took home a few bugs.. I tend to split none stop taking no breaks so I have a tendency to find more that many do... Some who collect with me describe me as the Every Ready bunny just keeps going and going..... Let me tell you all this when I got home last night and this morning I hurt. Decided against going north to my regular trilobite hunting quarry because I was not really up to it and there was no way I was getting up to set off at 5:30 AM this morning...... Here is the first pile of what I found each piece of rock has in it what is a trilobite that in the field showed the potential to be complete. On washing them down with the hose this morning not all are complete but most are close.

I found this while looking at rocks used in a train bed and after looking at a bunch of sites, I wanna say this is is part of the Order Redlichiida but that's as far as I got (assuming I'm right on the order)

Spent the day sorting, classifying, and consolidating the 20 flats of matrix I got from Bob Carroll. I was surprised finding this nice Dicranurus and after consolidating all the pieces it appears to be complete.

I haven't gotten out collecting nearly as much as I would have liked these past few months, but I finally got out today, June 1st. This was my first trip this spring to the Platteville Formation of Southeast Wisconsin and it was spectacular! We got to the first spot which was a new pit for us at around 7:45am. Luckily the owners were Amish so they were already outside working and gave us permission to collect their pit. They had recently worked the pit and put the rock they took out onto a driveway to a new barn so we looked at that too. On the driveway I picked up a little beat up rolled Bumastoides milleri. I didn't photograph it because it's a bit ugly. In the pit I found a Thaleops ovata, Sceptaspis lincolnensis, and what would have been double Gabriceraurus sp., but I couldn't find the piece that broke off for the life of me. Thaleops ovata Sceptaspis lincolnensis Gabriceraurus mifflinensis The next site was one we had collected a few times. It was here that the already fantastic day exploded into one of the best collecting outings I've had in a very long time. The list includes: 2 complete and 3 possibly complete Gabriceraurus sp. 1 complete and 1 possibly complete Isotelus simplex and 1 nice sized prone Bumastoides milleri Photos on next post. Our last stop was to collect a slab of crinoids I found last year. I brought my camera along to document the task but apparently I forgot to bring batteries... Here is the post regarding that find: Link

I am planning a second trip to Penndixie, first one was over 10 years ago. On my first trip I did a poor job of storing the specimens for the ride home and so several got broken (I forgot these are old as antiques). How do you store materials you find on site? I was thinking giant Tupperware container with rows of bubble wrap. I read about using Elmers glue as a stabilizer, should I buy paleobond or a stabilizing compound? My goal is to take my three sons, dig around in the dirt, and find something for the kids to put in a shadow box. Thank you, Adam