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Showing results for tags 'wutach'.
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From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
20cm. My best specimen of this species to date. Complete calcitized phragmocone. Herveyi Zone, Callovian. From the Wutach valley area.- 4 comments
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- callovian
- macrocephalites
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I set off this morning on my first excursion since my return from Canada. Now that I'm settled back in at home again, I was starting to twiddle my thumbs, so I figured it was about time to get back to the Callovian hillside sites in the woods of the Wutach Valley area. Rain was being forecast, but that didn't deter me. Just threw my raincoat, rubber overalls and boots into the car along with my equipment and off I went. I decided to check out a spot I'd already worked several times with varying results. This time it really payed off, since I managed to find a section in a familiar horizon which started giving up some well-preserved ammonites. It's often the case that they just come out in bits or are not in very good condition, but this time I hit paydirt. The best one, although there are quite a few nice ones, is a Macrocephalites with a diameter of 20cm. which should prep out quite nicely. This really was my lucky day. It didn't even rain! As usual I didn't think to take along my camera , which would have made for some nice in situ shots, but at least I've made a couple of pics of the finds in the raw. I'll be starting the prep work tomorrow, so I'll be posting them one after the other here as they're done.
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From the album: Belemnites
7cm. long rostrum. Along with a Macrocephalites sp. ammonite. From the herveyi Zone, Callovian, Middle Jurassic from the Wutach valley.-
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- belemnopsis
- callovian
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From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
The body chamber part measures 16cm. across. Discites zone, early Bajocian. Found in the Wutach Valley. -
Sonninia (Euhoploceras) marginatum (Buckman 1892)
Ludwigia posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
22mm. The innermost whorls. From the discites Zone, Early Bajocian in the Wutach Valley. -
From the album: German Gastropods and Bivalves
Diameter 7cm. Found in the Callovian layers in the Wutach Valley. -
From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
30cm. A good portion of a large specimen. What can be seen is only the phragmocone. The original shell including living chamber could have been up to half a meter in circumference. From the early Callovian in the Wutach Valley. -
I was out at my favorite spot in the Wutach Valley again on Tuesday and dug up a large one this time. It was in a huge block buried under a foot of dirt, leaves and rubble and first I thought that I'd struck bedrock, but that unfortunately didn't turn out to be the case. The area I'm exploring is an old landslide in the woods on the side of a small mountain and although I've found at least one spot where I can start following the bedrock layers up and down, I'm discovering more and more that the whole slope is just full of landslips and floes at various levels, so it's hardly possible to get your bearings in the horizontal and you just have to rely on luck and your nose. Anyway, I was quite struck with the size of this thing although I couldn't make out much due to the surrounding matrix, so I trimmed it down to a size that would fit into my knapsack and trudged back to the car with it. I spent a good 10 hours working on it over the last few days. Here are a few before pics. Front & back and you can just make out part of the keel in the last one. So I got down to trimming at first with the air pen. It went fairly well, since there was a good parting layer between matrix and fossil. The innermost whorls were unfortunately not there and I inadvertently punched a hole in it with the stylus. I fixed that up later with some stone meal. I placed a ruler in the first photo to show its size. I left a thin layer of matrix over the fossil, so as not to scratch it with the stylus. You can now see where part of the keel is broken off at the bottom in the first picture. I could have done some reparation there later with apoxy putty, but I'd already decided at this point to leave it as is, since it provides an interesting glimpse into the mineralized septa. The next few hours were spent mostly abrading with the odd swing back to the air pens to trim off some more excess matrix where it was possible. That was necessary to save some time, since a lot of the remaining matrix turned out to be quite hard and although I was working with 90psi it was still pretty slow going. Oops. Just run out of MBs. Have to move on to the next post.....
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- choffatia
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From the album: German Gastropods and Bivalves
6cm. With a partial Chlamys textoria bivalve. Steinkern on one side, shell on the other. From the Middle Jurassic Callovian at Buchberg in the Wutach Valley. -
With a phragmocone this size, it must have been quite a large specimen in real life. An extremely rare find for SW Germany.
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Inner whorls of the phragmocone.
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Calcite mold of the phragmocone.
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Inner whorls of the phragmocone.
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Inner whorls of the phragmocone. Attached to the echinoid Holectypus depressus.
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Kepplerites (Gowericeras) cf. metorchus (Buckman)
Ludwigia posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
3.5cm. This specimen with its shell mostly intact shows the innermost whorls of this subspecies. The venter at this stage is flat, but it rounds off at a later stage and gets covered up as it grows. From the koenigi zone, lower Callovian. Found in the Wutach area.-
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- callovian
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Limestone mold.
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From the album: German Gastropods and Bivalves
11cm. long. From the lower Jurassic Hettangian Angulatenton Formation, angulaten Zone. Found at a construction site near a small town in Wutachtal township.This species is also alternatively named Plagiostoma gigantea (Boehm 1911). I still haven't figured out which one has priority. -
A friend of mine told me last week that they'd started construction on a bypass around a small town in the Wutach area in the fall. They won't be really going at it until the springtime, but he visited the site last week and managed to find a couple of nice Hettangian ammonites on the scree pile, which was free of snow, since the temps are rising at the moment. So, since I was suffering from cabin fever, I figured I'd get out for some fresh air and give it a go. Well, there was lots of evidence of ammonites with a number of large body chamber pieces lying around, but it was obvious after a couple of hours of investigation, also directly at the exposure, that I had arrived quite a bit later than all the local collectors. I did however manage to find a well-preserved Plagiostoma gigantea, or giganteum (depending on which author you prefer) bivalve, which saved the day. I'll have to keep an eye on this site when they start working again anyway. Actually, it was just nice to get out a do some rummaging around.
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- bivalve
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Partially calcitized limestone mold of the phragmocone, which would have made for quite a large individual originally.
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Bullatimorphites (Kheraiceras) bullatus (D'Orbigny 1846
Ludwigia posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
3.5cm. From the herveyi zone, early Callovian in the Wutach Valley. -
From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
6cm. From the Callovian herveyi zone in the Wutach alley. -
From the album: Brachiopoda
18mm. long. From the Callovian herveyi Zone from the Wutach valley. -
Macrocephalites (Pleurocephalites) (Buckman 1922)
Ludwigia posted a gallery image in Member Collections
From the album: Middle Jurassic Ammonites from Southern Germany
5cm. From the Callovian herveyi Zone in the Wutach Valley. -
Calcite mold of the phragmocone with beautifully marked septal suture lines. A small group of tube worms also colonized the shell after death.
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Yesterday I decided to go looking for new exposures in the Wutachtal. I did a bit of research beforehand which helped me get my bearings in the woods, but I still ended up clambering about for a couple of hours before I finally reached the level that I was looking for. There just aren't all that many exposures in the Callovian and Bathonian in the underbrush, but I finally managed to locate a roughly beaten bridal path that led me to the Bathonian varians-Schichten and the Callovian Wutach Formation which I was looking for. The first is directly underneath the second and they are together only about 6 meters thick, so once you've found one, you've found them both. The horizons are made up of iron oolite and limestone sediments with some marl in between and they are reputed to be relatively fossiliferous. Fallen trees are a good place to look. The iron was mined at various places in the area from the Middle Ages up to the end of WW2, but all of the old mines and quarries have been refilled or built over, which is why you have to go into the hills now if you want to find anything. Light is scarce at the moment, so I only had a few hours to do some exploratory digs, but I did get off to a relatively good start, having found a few fossils, some of which I've prepared today and am showing here. I'm planning to head out there again tomorrow to do some more intensive exploring. Macrocephalites jacquoti. 6.5cm. Procerites sp. 6cm. Procerites sp. 10cm.
