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I am fortunate enough to have such a huge amount of Middle Devonian Givetian material that I thought it best to put the older Middle Devonian stage, the Eifelian, in its own thread. There are some spectacular fossils here as well though! I thought a good place to start would be in the Formosa Reef, which I believe is quite early Eifelian. This tabulate coral and stromatoporoid reef continues similar complexes found from the Middle Silurian, see my: https://www.thefossilforum.com/topic/84678-adams-silurian/page/3/ thread from page three onwards for details. All these Formosa Reef specimens come from a delightful gift from my good friend @Monica who is a tad busy with life at the moment but is fine and still thinking of the forum. This outcrop can be found on Route 12 near Formosa/Amherstburg, Bruce County, Ontario, Canada. This beautiful-looking specimen came to me with only a third of it revealed but I managed to get it this far after nine days of painful pin prepping. Monica found another one and posted it for ID here: https://www.thefossilforum.com/topic/105528-weird-circular-imprints-formosa-reef-lower-devonian/#comment-1172285 The specimen was identified by another Canny Canadian @Kane to be the little stromatoporoid sponge Syringostroma cylindricum. Hardly a reef-builder, but gorgeous nonetheless. It does have a little thickness to it, but not much. Beautiful! Pretty thin, actually. I love this Monica, thank you!

Hi is this a Cephalopod or a Rugose coral it’s from the Onondaga formation. I have been told that it could be a a Cephalopod by one person and Rugose coral by another. Thank you!

I was planning to attend the Museum of the Earth's outing to Jamesville Quarry and knew that gas would be the primary expense for the three and a half hour trip each way. So, I decided to make the most of it and head up there two days early, camp, and visit some very productive Middle Devonian sites my girlfriend, Valerie and I explored last May. 11:30 Thursday morning I arrived at Deep Springs Road quarry near Lebanon in Madison County. It is an excellent exposure of the Windom Shale and was my favorite site on my last visit to the area. A wide variety of well preserved fossil invertebrates are profuse in the relatively soft shale where they can usually be extracted without too much difficulty. Many preserved in calcite, can be removed entirely from the rock. Within the first fifteen minutes I uncovered a small Greenops trilobite cephalon. Several minutes later, I found a complete Phacops rana enrolled. The very top of its cephalon shattered when I removed it from the rock, but otherwise it was perfect. Here's a picture: Almost as exciting was the wide assortment of excellent bivalve fossils I found. This is a Grammysia: Brachiopods were also abundant. This is Athyris spiriferoids: Also found other partial trilobites, crinoid stems, gastropods, and a tiny goniatite. I was going to spend a few hours there and then head over to a nearby exposure of the upper Ludlowville Formation, but I ended up spended the whole day at Deep Springs Road. Friday morning I drove twenty minutes to Pompey Center and a famous roadcut along Route 20 where the Skaneateles Formation is well exposed. Within minutes I found a nice large Cornulites, a bivalve: There were other bivalves as well. This is Modiomorpha: One of my goals was to find a large Spyroceras, a straight-shelled nautiloid. Last May we collected a number of fragments. Friday I was hoping for a more complete one. Wasn't to happen. This is one of the fragments I collected: Also found a number of fragments of Michelinoceras, another straight-shelled nautiloid. The surprise of the morning was a two and a quarter inch goniatite found lying free on top of the roadcut: It was nearly an hour drive east to the tiny hamlet of North Brookfield through stunning farm country. Nearby is a sandstone quarry exposing the Skaneateles Formation which is famous for its abundance of Dipleura dekayi, a huge burrowing trilobite. Valerie and I only spent a short while there last May. Still I was able to find three Dipleura cephalons, a pygidium, also an enormous bivalve, brachiopods, and cephalopods. The first rock I split open on Friday revealed a small, but complete Dipleura cephalon, better than any of the ones I found on my last trip. A few minutes later, I split another sandstone slab and I immediately focused on a bivalve in the center, but then my eyes drifted down to something unusual in the corner. There was the thorax and pygidium of a young Dipleura. When I turned the slab on its side I saw the cephalon still attached to the body, pointing downwards. Even though it was young, it is at least three times the size of the adult Phacops I found the previous day: Later I found a number of pygidiums and some bivalves, including one very large Leioptera. Saturday morning, the Museum of the Earth group was planning to congregate at 11:00 so that gave almost an hour an half to return to Pompey Center. I decided to focus on the lower portion of the roadcut which is shale where last May Valerie found a perfect Paleozygopleura, a lovely corkscrew-shaped gastropod. I was hoping to find one myself. After a while of digging in the crumbly shale, I found a small complete Greenops trilobite. Unfortunately the fragile body was stuck in the imprint and much of it crumbled when i removed it. However the imprint is perfect: Later, I found my own Paleozygopleura, though not as good as the one Valerie found: I joined the Museum of the Earth group at Jamesville Quarry. That excursion is very well documented by Marley's Ghost so I need not repeat anything. I did find a number of teeth of Onychodus sigmoides a rhipidistian fish as well as other small unidentified fish parts. In the Nedrow member of the Onondaga Limestone I found excellent examples of Favosites, a tabulate coral. I brought a number of pieces back. They really show the structure well: Well, that's about it. It's been hectic the past few days organizing, sorting, and cleaning my specimens as well as getting back on track with all the personal and professonal matters I neglected while I was away three days. All in all it feels good to be back home.

Hi guys, It had been a year since I was last out seriously fossil collecting and I was chomping at the bit this spring as the snow thawed. Work on a new kitchen and dining room on my house prevented me from taking time off to go trekking. I finally got a chance a few weeks ago and took a week long trip around southern Ontario and West/Central NY. I had missed searching at some favorite sites as well as seeing my collecting friends. It was a lot of stuff so I'll be breaking my report into parts. I started out on Thursday the 8th of May and drove up nearly nonstop to Toronto. I was planning meeting Kevin (Northernsharks) and watching my Phillies (as phrustrating as they have been of late) at the Rodgers Centre in Toronto against the Blue Jays. I say nearly non-stop because I snuck in a hour of so of prospecting at an abandoned quarry that exposes the Onondaga formation (Lower Devonian) south of Syracuse, NY. It's been left alone for a while and quite a bit of the old floor has been covered with vegetation but there is some still exposed which is composed of the Edgecliff member of the Onondaga Formation. The Edgecliff member is a record of a coral biostrome that occasionally grades into a bioherm. Basically that means it's a shallow, reef like complex deposited horizontally. I didn't have much time to really look around and study the different layers of the quarry and basically focused my collecting on the ample loose surface fossils. Some of my better finds: Favosites turbinatus (it's fairly low profile compared to the ones I find in Arkona or the Centerfield Mbr. in NY) Some other corals were found, but all seemed to be really short or otherwise stunted. Maybe the reef was frequently subject to waves which prevented taller forms from growing? Giant Brachiopods!Kozlowskiella raricesta? I think these two are Meristella arcuata? Maybe the pedicle valve of a Leptostrophia perplana? Leptanea sp. Atrypa sp. A really nice Platystoma sp. gastropod ... And some really large, stoloniferous crinoiod stems. The reef even seemed to grow on top of these stems in places. Lastly I was lucky enough to find two trilobits. A partial pygidium and a weathered Cephalon. Not sure of the genera on these, I'm still doing some research. Ondontocephalus? I'm basing my ID's shown above on the paper STRATIGRAPHY OF THE ONONDAGA LIMESTONE (DEVONIAN) IN CENTRAL NEW YORK By William A. Oliver, Jr (Bulletin of the Geological Society of America VOL. 66. PP. 621-662. JULY 1954). I picked up what I'd found and jumped back on the road and made it to downtown Toronto by 4:30pm. Before the game, Kevin and I met at a local brewhouse called Steamwhistle (who makes an awesome Pilsner!) and then grabbed a hot dog before the game. My Phillies lost epically but the company (and beer) was good and I can cross another baseball stadium off my list. The next morning I got up and drove down to Ridgemont quarry, near Fort Erie, to try and find a Eurypterid. I'd been warned by both Malcolmt and Pleecan that the collecting area was smaller than last year and they were correct. I spent four hours excavating an area and only found a few bits of Eurypterid and nothing else. Nobody else even showed up which made for a lonely day. The weather was nice with a breeze often wafting through to help cool me down. At times I would take a break and look around the piles of discards and quarry rock to see if there was anything else interesting. I did wind up taking home four pieces of the thin bedded dolostone to use as flag stones in my yard. Even though I didn't find anything significant this trip it is always good to take advantage of a opportunity when available. Since I had a little more time on my hands I took the long route to my hotel in London, Ontario via the "back roads" which proved to be a good idea. Less trucks, nice farmland scenery and the interesting contradiction of driving through a town in Ontario named Dehli that had prominent German and Belgian social clubs. It was like globe trotting without all the flights. Saturday I drove over to Hungry Hollow, Ont. to search for Blastoids, Trilobites and Corals in the Arkona and Widder formations (Devonian age, Givetian stage). I'd heard that the pits were restricted but there were no new signs that I had not seen before and I'd been told by workers I'd met in the pits that it was okay to collect. I spent the morning in the south pit crawling among the muddy eroded remnants of the Arkona formation and Hungry Hollow member of the Widder Formation. I got lucky within the first hour and found myself a Hyperoblastus filosa Blastoid! It's in good shape and is much bigger than the other specimen that I found there a few years ago: http://viewsofthemahantango.blogspot.com/2011/04/hyperoblastus-reimanni.html I spent the better part of the day in the south pit as a group of collectors from the London, Ont. club were on the north side of the river and I didn't want to interfere with their trip. Around noon I walked down along the riverbank to the south bank cliffs. Here I found a Favosites turbinatus and some other large corals. A nice intact Alveolites colony A giant colony of Favosites hamiltoniae I think this is a Favosites placenta (maybe F. argus, I get them mixed up sometimes) A nice specimen of Helliophyllum halli with the cup clean out to show off the septae Besides the corals there were some other cool things found in the pit like this heartbreaker of a Basidechenella trilobite. A partial but HUGE cephalon from a Phacops A nice Tentaculites plate from the Arkona formation This cool Crinoid segment (wish I knew what genera is comes from) A very large, single valve from a Spinocyrtina granulosus (about the biggest I've found at the site to date) A Platyceras sp. gastropod that popped out some limestone I was working on Before I left, I hit the north pit to collect a small container of Arkona formation shale and a couple of buckets of eroded Hungry Hollow mbr. that I can wash and sort through later for micros. Maybe I'll get lucky and find another blastoid! Here is a view of the north pit looking south towards the river. The water is a lovely shale of cerulean. More to come in the next installment.....

I will going on the Museum of the Earth outing to the Jamesville quarry site scheduled for 9/21/13. I plan to arrive two days early and collect at a number of sites I've collected at before. These include Pompey Center, Deep Springs Road and Briggs Road near Earlville, and Cole Hill. Any suggestions of other good places to possibly visit or join me. Thank you,