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Over the last year I have made a few trips to explore an abandoned, partially reclaimed spoil pile in East Central Illinois. Coal was mined from underground at this site until the 1940s, and it was largely graded and replanted in the early 2000s. However, a ridge adjacent to the main pile still exposes the overburden from the mine, including the fossiliferous Pennsylvanian Energy Shale. Although not anywhere near as productive as Mazon Creek or the Fowler Park site in Indiana, I have found a small variety of plant fossils at this site. This weekend I made a quick trip to see what had been exposed by weathering over the past few months. The first picture shows the main spoil pile in the background with exposures on the ridge in the foreground. The sparse vegetation on the right is the result of a coal fire still burning in places inside the smaller pile- you can feel the heat close to the ground and see smoke rising in the winter, which means caution is required. On this trip I found a handful of nodules, including a few already split. The first open one is a small fern pinnule, while the second is my first Lycopodites or Lepidodendron branch tip.
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