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  1. Happy Christmas eve, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a prosperous new year! It may be Christmas eve, but its also Friday, which means its a Fossil Friday. I missed las week due to being sick. Today's video offering is from the first day of a long, multi-day fossil exploration trip in South Dakota.
  2. Day 2 of our exploration trip, this time we were exploring a ranch in the Pierre shale. This was a massive ranch which Walter had done a small amount of exploration years ago. The 3 teams split up again, and my group went to the farthest north of the ranch to begin. This required miles of off-road driving. Its incredible how much area some of these ranches contain! Even though we spent about an hour searching, we didnt find any fossils, although my son and I found 2 arrowheads. I was happy with those, as they were the first ones I have ever found. We moved on to another area and spent a couple more hours searching. There was a lot more exposure at this site and we began to find some scattered broken concretions and bits of bivalves, ammonites and baculites but it wasnt anything great, so then we moved on to a 3rd site (which of course was on the path we already took in). Here we began finding a lot more. There were concretions of shell conglomerate spread around, and many partials of ammonites on the surface. We picked up a lot of concretions to prep at home, broke open a few in the field, and this is where we found our first ammonite. Its small, but its a first. We also managed to find a couple sections of what is likely Baculites Grandis My son seems to have a knack for finding pointy things, either teeth or points. He managed to find a 3rd arrowhead at this last site! Walter was really hoping that we would find a Mosasaur weathering out, but we didnt do too bad. I still have a bucket full of concretions to explore.
  3. What a trip my son and I had this year! We started out in the Hell Creek fm of South Dakota. This was a special trip through Paleo Adventures for his "veteran" guests who have already spent a few years with him and could operate without supervision. We started out hunting a new ranch. This property is virgin ground with LOTS of acreage that needed exploration. The group was split into 3 teams, each taking a different area. Our team was further split into pairs. So, it was my son and me, exploring for new outcrops. The sun was intense, the temperature hot, and hours of hiking and staring intently at the ground for float and possibly something sticking out of a wall. Eventually we worked our way down into a draw and found an ironstone layer. Closer inspection revealed a large amount of fossil material. There were bits of turtle shell, croc scutes and small bone bits all throughout. The only complete bone was this distal caudal vert my son found. The sight was thus named "Mitchells Micro Site". We bagged a selection for further study, marked the location and continued on. From the draw, we worked our way up to the main butte. Another pair was investigating the east side, so we began working the west side. Only a few minutes later I spotted a small sun faded bit of float. I began looking up the slope and saw another, and another. As I climbed the side it was obvious that I was on a hot trail, and then I found it, a bone sticking out of the wall, just below the surface. Sadly, the only thing left was about the last 8 inches of the bone (like Edmontosaur), and its full of root rot so the prep is going to be ugly. Just around the corner I followed more float down the slope and found an Ed vert centrum in the wash. The processes are gone, but surprisingly the broken edge seen in the pic, was laying on the surface up-slope, so its reattached and the prep has begun. Walter's team found a large surface exposure, about half a mile away and determined that my Ed finds, and another team's finds were all the same horizon of large multitaxic bone bed. My son ended up finding a nannotyranus tooth in the large exposure site, the only tooth found there that day. And then a call came across the radio "we've got 11 vertebrae in the wall and they just keep popping out". Of course, everyone went to check it out! It appears to be a juvenile Ed. with caudal verts exposed so far, but Walter is hopeful the most of it is still in the ground. Even though it was already late in the afternoon, I'm sure we would have stayed on the site much longer but a wicked looking storm was building fast and moving our way. So the race was on to recover what was exposed so far and get out while the getting was good. We barely got out too. As soon as we got to the pavement, I could see a lowering coming down from the storm, and it wasnt much longer someone said they could see it sucking dirt up. The last place I want to be during a tornado is in the middle of the prairie and stuck in bentonite. So that was the end of the first day. We headed back to town tired, sweaty, but ecstatic after an incredibly successful day.
  4. Hey everyone, Just an update on my recent adventures exploring the Whetstone gulf formation. My last post I went to 2 gorges in the Tug Hill Plateau area known to expose the formation. I didn’t find any significant fossils but it was a good learning experience. On one of my recent weekend adventures I spent all of a Saturday and Sunday hiking another gorge that exposes the Whetstone. I won’t always be posting exact locations in these posts. Sometimes discretion is needed so I’m not blasting localities on this particular one. It happened to be the cold and rainy weekend in the northeast US so they were very cold and wet hikes. It seems the “upper whetstone”......a rather loose term......is more productive as far as frequency of faunal zones from what I’ve read and have been told by reputable sources. This means....you need to get to the upper parts of the formation. These massive gulfs/gorges don’t offer really any access so if you want to get inside the gorges you need to start downstream and hike DEEEEEEEP into the gorges working upstream to get to bedrock that “might” have something. The whetstone gulf formation is dominated by shales with thin sandstone beds inter layered in different concentrations. The upper whetstone has the sandstone layers in more abundance and it is reflected by the debris in the streams. The shale however doesn’t last long....at all! Based on what I saw these 2 field days......the really “good” fossiliferous stuff is in the softer dark grey shales. The sandstones do have nice fossils but extraction is nearly impossible. The fossils in the shales never make it downstream into easily accessible hiking areas either. It’s part of why I think the Whetstone generally isn’t sought out. Just doesn’t seem to attract much attention. On my first hike on Saturday (May 9th 2020) I was determined to hike as far into the undisclosed gorge as possible. I just wanted to see if I could find any sign of these hot zones with fossils. I hiked VERY FAR up into the gorge. No real trails and I had to get a little creative to keep my feet dry and still push upstream. It was Really cold so I tried to stay dry at all costs. I was super far into the wilderness, deep into a massive gorge, and super alone....weird feeling venturing so deep into a gorge and you are sure nobody’s been there for a long time. A few shots of the field terrain. It was cold but sunny during parts of the day...and snow/rained to get me nice and wet. It wasn’t until I got very far and very deep into the gorge that I saw the first sign of a fossil. I didn’t look hard for fossils as much early on cause all the pieces of shale downstream were barren and I didn’t even see shale fragments with fossils so I took that as my queue to keep walking. First sign of a trilobite I’ve found in the Whetstone!! I took this picture cause I was positive it wasn’t going to stay together I grabbed it and it began to disintegrate as expected but...... I found this in the process. A cryptolithis bellus cephalon!!! So cool. I felt like I was seeing a ghost. After all that reading, planning, and walking.....and walking lol.....I finally found evidence of the iconic Cryptolithis trilobite!! I’ve only ever see photos so it was very rewarding getting up close to the real thing. Turns out this is one of my best specimens so far. I found a few other fragments in the same small piece of shale. The articulated crinoid columns are a common feature in the fossiliferous shale. Not sure if the calyx’s show up I didn’t see anything in the literature but who knows. This tiny slab has 3 Triarthrus cephalons too. Continued.....
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