Burlington Formation fossil hunt (3/7/2021)

[Jackson g]

I had some spare time this past weekend, and a fossil hunt sounded nice. Bad weather had made that impossible the previous month. The weather was great out finally, so I went out Sunday (3/7/2021) to good old Truman Lake to look for Burlington Formation crinoids.

 

I mainly just wanted to find and keep nicer, intact crinoids that day. It's a good walk to the crinoid hunting grounds from my car, and there is fossiliferous chert material along the way. I decided to split one chunk of chert, which contained only one single platyceras gastropod steinkern. After finishing work on it, I hid the snail along the trail behind a tree because it was to delicate to carry along. I actually ended up forgetting it, and will have to retrieve it next weekend.

 

Once I got done walking and hit the encrinite rock, I decided to hunker down and look for recently fallen debris. Within 5 minutes I found my nice first possible complete calyx. Only prep would tell if this was complete, but it was worth throwing in the backpack.

 

Looking low was paying off, because 3 feet away and right where the water level dropped was another one. I could tell right off the bat it was an Azygocrinus rotundus. It looked complete, but being lodged upright and inbetween two more pieces of rock, it was almost guaranteed to either be missing plates or extremely weathered.

 

It was weathered, but actually better than I had thought!

 

As I kept going, I kept flipping rock. Its always good to look at the underside of fossiliferous rock, because I've found some nice pieces that way. The next find was found doing just that, and looked to be a complete Macrocrinus verneuilianus. This is what I saw before flipping it over.

 

And the backside after some rinsing in the lake.

 

After throwing that in the backpack, I kept scrounging. Macrocrinus was the most common find of the day, and I found another within minutes. This one was buried in some sediment on a bigger chunk of rock. Can you find it?

 

It will definitely clean up well.

 

I spent another hour or so looking around and also managed to find a nice Uperocrinus pyriformis crinoid and another partial Macrocrinus verneuilianus calyx, but I didn't get pictures of those in the field. I cleaned up everything with soap and water when I got home, but I only had time to prep one crinoid and partially prep another one. Well, heres the calyxs cleaned up.

 

Uperocrinus pyriformis 

 

Macrocrinus verneuilianus #1 (first crinoid find after final prep)

 

macrocrinus verneuilianus #2

 

Macrocrinus verneuilianus #3

 

Azygocrinus rotundus 

 

Macrocrinus verneuilianus #4

 

And why not end on a brachiopod! Thanks for reading.

[historianmichael]

Awesome finds! The array of crinoids and blastoids that can be found in the Burlington Limestone is really impressive 

[Jackson g]

15 hours ago, historianmichael said:

Awesome finds! The array of crinoids and blastoids that can be found in the Burlington Limestone is really impressive 

Thanks! I agree that the number of species in the Burlington Formation is astounding. I always manage to find something different every time, which is always nice.