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April 9 was my birthday, and what a coincidence... it also happened to be a day when Dallas Paleo Society had a field trip scheduled into the Martin Marietta quarry down in Midlothian, TX... and I got on the list. The first "find" of the day was when Polly, our trip leader, presented me with a birthday cupcake. After signing our release forms, the DPS crew was led into the quarry. We were taken to an area where they had just dug up some fresh rock. Everyone scattered about the area, and soon the "clink.. clink..." of rock hammers on shale was heard everywhere. (Just for the record, the site is in the basal Atco formation of the Austin Chalk.) I wasn't doing so well. Nothing seemed to be turning up in the older section that I had decided to check out, so I wandered back over into the new area with everyone else. Nothing much happened in the first few minutes of surface collecting, then I saw THIS... My first ever fossil fish tail! Probably no chance of ever getting a genus or species ID on this. Still, it's Cretaceous Fish, and that's good enough for me. I was lucky that the slab had split right there, so both the tail & counterslab were right next to each other. I sat down and started going through the other rock in that area, and found this, too: Might be part of the same fish, but I think I'll have to do a bit of prep work on it to be able to tell if it's head, body chunk, or what. I have the fish material stored in a temporary jacket til I get time to lay some Butvar-76 on it. (Continued... )