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Showing results for tags 'odontopleura'.
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G'day TFF, I thought i'd share with you all the results of my recent trilobite hunting trip in country NSW, Australia. This is only the second time i have been able to collect trilobites and i am very pleased with the results! My family and i went out to a spot near Forbes that is part of the Silurian-aged Cotton Formation. The rocks are marine and date back about 435 million years old! It's crazy to think that at the time these animals were alive in the sea, there was very little life yet on land at all! The most common find here is the trilobite Odontopleura markhami, but you can also find graptolites and rare brachiopods and gastropods. We got to the site around about 11 am and quickly started splitting as many rocks as we could looking for the trilobites, and after being there for only about a minute i managed to split a beautiful near-complete Odontopleura markhami with both the positive and negative sides. It was only about the second or third rock i cracked open too! For the next few hours my family and i continued to whack away at the rocks and we managed to find at least 5 other complete trilobites during that time, in addition to lots and lots of disarticulated body parts (isolated heads, tails, sections of thorax etc). Mum and i got the best examples, but it really does tend to come down to luck (and persistence)! It was a great little trip and the specimens below are already proudly displayed in one of my bedroom glass cabinets. Now for the pictures! The Location: The Days Best Finds (complete or near-complete trilobites only) First of all i thought i'd include a picture of what the seafloor might have looked like in this part of Australia 435 million years ago. This was the Odontopleura markhami i found barely a minute after arriving at the site! My other favourite example that i found I love this Odontopleura markhami that mum found! The detail of the spines is amazing! Other great examples. All are again Odontopleura markhami. Thanks for checking this report out and happy hunting to all! Cheers, Nathan
- 24 replies
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- 8
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- australian trilobites
- cotton formation
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Hey guys, I found this a couple days ago from a Silurian marine locality (435 Ma) in Central Western NSW, Australia, that is rich in trilobite and graptolite remains. I don't know of any other fossil types coming from this site so the options for what this object could be from are somewhat limited to being trilobite in origin. To me it resembles some of the larval protaspid stage trilobites i have seen, but the thing that is tripping me up is the size. The object is 5mm across which would be huge for a trilobite protaspis would it not? The adult trilobites from the locality are not very big either, about 2cm at maximum (mostly Odontopleura markhami, which is estimated to comprise 99% of the trilobite fossils at this location). The only other thing i can think of is that it could be an isolated brood pouch but i don't really know enough about trilobites to say for sure. What do you guys think? The left side is the concave negative, and the right is the convex positive (a bit hard to tell from the photo). It literally just looks like a round domed circle in the rock. Thanks!
- 12 replies
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- australia
- brood pouch
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