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Hi all, Last weekend I took a trip, again, to the Florissant Fossil Quarry. The quarry doesn’t normally open until Memorial Day, but I went with the Colorado State University entomology club. I successfully lobbied for the club to take a field trip there, and the club got the trip funded by the student’s association so we got to go in as a by-appointment special group for “free” (at least for us). Perhaps this whole process is a story I’ll tell another time. Anyway, for those not familiar in the upper Eocene Florissant Formation fossils of insects and plants are highly abundant, but fossils of vertebrates are exceptionally rare. This is despite being a superficially similar depositional environment to the Green River Formation, where fish fossils are abundant. Well, after countless total hours of splitting in the quarry over the years I’ve finally come across a vertebrate fossil - the head of a teleost fish! This is exciting simply because fish fossils are very rare in this rock unit. The shale breaking split the fossil, so presumably the body is still out in the quarry somewhere. There are of course fish described from Florissant, but I’m not familiar with them. The only identification I can readily make is teleost. Thought I’d share a rare find! My “white whale” for the Florissant Formation is still a spider fossil. There were three spiders found by entomology club participants, but of course I was not one of them. Of course I’d find the way more rare thing, but not the thing I wanted 😀

Well, I'm in my new habitat out here in Colorado, and while I miss dearly a good paddle on the river and my fossil hunts in the mud and sand, I had to make a trip out to our local spot at the Florissant Fossil Quarry. The kids seemed to dig smashing shale (it lasted about an hour), and the technique actually yielded our first decent leaf fossil. The shale smasher .. in disguise !! Dad, wanted to take a lighter approach and we did come home with a large bag of shale and some plant and insect specimens. I'll post some of those in this thread, eventually when I scan them. Splitting the shale you will often come upon Reaaaaly tiny insects that my failing vision has a hard time catching. This winged insect (a mosquito ?!) had bits on each side of the rock so I scanned and composited him in Photoshop. Didn't turn out too bad. I'll let you know what else I find. Raw Scans: Composite: Cheers, Brett