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I was halfway to the Wutach this morning when I suddenly realized that I'd forgotten my camera again. Sorry 'bout that There would have been some nice in situ shots, but at least I can show you what I found. It was a really hot day, and despite the fact that I was in the shadow of the woods, I was sweating like a race horse. I held out for about 6 hours, consumed 2 liters of water and had just told myself I'd had enough when I decided to just chip out that corner over there. And guess what? That big one at the top right popped out. A fine conclusion to a pretty successful hunt. I'll post some of these here as I get them prepped and I promise to do my best as far as cameras are concerned next time around.

I recently posted a report here about the finds I made on a trip to the Wutach Valley and promised that the next time I went there, I would finally remember to take my camera along. For those of you who may not be aware, the Wutachtal (in German) is quite a large area and also the name of a municipality in the southeastern Black Forest region. Within this area are a good number of beautiful nature reserves, the best known of which is the Wutachschlucht, or Wutach Gorge in English. It's not quite as huge as the Grand Canyon, but is certainly comparable with the Verdon Gorge, a famous tourist trap in the Provence in France. The Wutach (English: angry brook) has its source in the highest peak of the Black Forest massif, and winds its way eastward through crystalline paleozoic sediments and then more and more rapidly cutting down through first Permian, then Triassic and finally Jurassic and Cenozoic layers. One would think when you move down that the layers would get older, but due to 2 successive tectonic uplifts in the Late Jurassic and late Cretacous periods, the entire southern German tectonic plate is tipped 7° to the east. All of the Cretaceous sediments were also eroded away a long time ago, which is why they can't be found, even underground, in southwestern Germany. The area that has particularly interested me is the one in the municipality of Wutachtal, where a good portion of the Jurassic layers are exposed. It's a classical area for geologists and paleontologists and of course amateur collectors like myself. I've been exploring and looking for exposures for many years, first focussing on the Lower Jurassic, then particularly the Middle Jurassic Aalenian and Bajocian stages and now for going on 2 years, I've been concentrating my efforts on the Callovian Wutach Formation. I've managed to find an area where I've been able to regularly make some finds and recently returned to an exposure which panned out quite well, so I decided I definitely had to get back there again soon. So I was just there yesterday. Here come some pics of it to which I'll first describe the exposure for you. What you see here is a series of mostly soft clay marl layers with the odd hard marly limestone bank in between. Almost all of the sediment is extremely turbidite and full of iron oolites, which accounts for the pronounced red, reddish-brown, yellowy and violet tints. In the middle of the photo is the negative imprint of a large Macrocephalites ammonite which I dug out on the previous excursion. This imprint sits on top of a hard limestone bank. The sediment above it is a much softer clay, which allows mostly for a successful excavation of the fossils in this particular bank. And at this partular small exposure I should add. Conditions can vary when one moves horizontally. Nevertheless, fossils found in this bank here are by far the best preserved. This photo shows the same layers, just a little to the right. And here a little to the left. Note the white limestone sinter, which can be a disturbance to the fossils. The lithological name for this zone is the "Rotes Erlager". As a biozone it's called the herveyi zone. This is about 1 meter thick. This pile which lies between pic 1 & 3 accomodates my scree, broken bits of ammonites, for the moment. I'll be removing it later on, just as I have in the past at the other points, in order to get at the layers. This was my first find of the day. Looks to be a Choffatia sp. Slightly deformed. A couple more. Not easy to see what's in the matrix, is it? Now you know why I use an air abrader You just have to break up some of these big rocks in order to get the little jewels out. Otherwise your knapsack is so heavy by the end of a successful day, that you can't heave it onto your back any more. At this point, I'd dug into the sinter vein. Time to get it out and get around it. I've just run out of pixels. Time to move on to the next post

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.

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.....

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.

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.