Paleo Acumen

[Uncle Siphuncle]

All,

I'm curious how each of us have arrived at our current levels of expertise and experience in paleo. Do some of you have bachelors, masters, and/or doctorates in geology, paleo, or related fields? I openly admit to having no formal training in paleo. My level of knowledge is limited by what references I've been able to access, what collectors I've been able to befriend through clubs like the Dallas Paleo Society and Paleo Society of Austin, what personal observations I've made in the field, and dialog I've joined in on fine discussion venues such as this one.

Recognizing an innate interest in fossils since about the age of 5, my interest was bolstered at YMCA summer camp at age 10. After a couple decades hiatus I joined the DPS and began going on their field trips and meeting experienced collectors around the state. After a while I felt comfortable running around solo or with one buddy or another exploring for virgin sites of all types and ages. At the same time I've been building a personal paleo library, learning what I can, and hitting the field as often as possible. I've made friends with a couple museums and established relationships with a few grad students and faculty members through making donations and occasionally taking them into the field to help their research. I suppose my collection is fairly large for the 4-5 years I've been at it seriously, but I feel I may be missing some important details due to lack of experience.

Being disconnected from "professional" or mainstream paleo however I know I'm missing important contextual information as I hit the field (lithological and depositional details, etc.) In addition, I feel like I have trouble finding the best references to help me correctly identify specimens and locate type localities. If anyone has a general method for running down advanced references and original descriptions I'd love to hear from you. Time for me to elevate this pursuit to a more scholarly level because as we all know, knowledge breeds success.

Feel free to mention how your paleo experience has snowballed over time.

[jkfoam]

Dan.

You have introduced an interesting topic and I look forward to responses from other Forum subscribers.

As for my self, my interest in fossils originated from my wife's profession as an 8th grade Earth Science teacher in public schools. When she first started teaching she wanted to visit some rock shops to acquire specimens to suplement the meager supplies available from the school to benefit her students. Naturally this required my participation. As a result I became interested in lapidary and rock/minerals. We joined the Houston Gem and Mineral Society(HGMS) initially because of the interesting programs they presented and as a resource for information on earth science. I initially pursued the lapidary part of the hobby, collecting Texas agates and petrified wood. Mineral specimen are not readily collectable in Texas but fossils were available for collecting.

The HGMS had several active Sections within the club. They had a Paleontology Section which offered introductory and advanced classes in Paleontology which my wife and I took. The advanced classes were taught by professional Paleontologist who worked for EXXON and volunteered there time and expertise. As best I remember it was a 16 week class that used " Invertebrate Fossils" by Moore et.al. as the text. At the end of the class we had a 2 day collecting field trip. What a great experience. I took this class 30 years ago and I believe that the HGMS Paleontology Section is still presenting these classes.

As a result I became very interested in the Gulf Coast tertiary fossils and corals and have more or less specialized in those areas. My interest was interrupted for a number of years for professional reasons (we have to make a living) but now that I am retired I have renewed my interest.

Dan, as far as finding the best references for identifying specimen, as least for me, I have relied very heavily on the series " Treatis on Invertebrate Paleontology". The bibliographies they provide are a valuble resource. Fortunately I live fairly close to the U. of Texas campus and have access to their Geology library. Unfortunately, the libraries and science publications have not completely made it in to the digital age yet so science publications are not available to everyone on-line. I fear this will not happen soon enough to benefit me personally. Also, the Bureau of Economic Geology, U.of Texas, use to publish Geology bibliographies on Texas. It was a good resource for local fossils. Unfortunately I don't think they have published one in the last 10-20 years. (I could be wrong on this as I am out of date).

[Gatorman]

Thank you, Dan, for starting such an interesting subject. My personal paleo education was pretty much all gained from this forum and a handful of books. I've only been collecting for a few years now, I got into it after Cris took me to a creek he found a beautiful mammoth tooth at, its the same creek I found both my mammoth tooth and my mastodon tooth. Most of my collecting is done underwater but I don't have dive equipment so it is rather difficult at times. Cris and I haven't been for a long time now.

[ebrocklds]

i, like many of us here, started as a young boy collecting rocks and fossil near my house. with two grandparents that enjoy rockhounding i had many opportunities to get out and find things. growing up i always thought i would become an archeaologist, but at 14 years old i was invited to an open house at a local paleontology lab to see a newly finished stegosaurus. i was hook from then on. when i turned 16 i went to the same lab and applied for a job, willing to sweep floors and clean window. they hired me and i went straight to cleaning casts of ceratosaurus and other jurassic dinosaurs that were being constructed for a new museum that was going to open in just over a year. i continued working with them at the north american museum of ancient life for several more years. i have since worked with a few other labs at universities and commercial companies preparing, molding, restoring and mounting mainly dinosaur material. this i did until a short time ago when the company i worked for closed its doors. i was presented with the opportunity to start my own company and so i did. i have also taken several years of geology at Brigham Young University and spent countless hours reading anything i can get my hands on. much of my practical knowledge has come from the time i have spent in the field digging everything from soft-bodied cambrian things to sauropods. close associations with other paleo minded peole has also seemed to wear off on me.

[Desmond]

No formal training at all. I was taking a walk with my son and decided to see if there were any turtles in the creek on our farm. As I was looking around for turtles I found a very nice if small arrowhead. It was made of flint ridge flint which is translucent and spectacularly colored. After finding that I started to walk the fields we have and found several spear points and knives.

Well being flat as a pancake here, if not flatter, I was finding some nice fossil brachiopods turning up out of the tillage as well. I found I like taking trips around the mid-west hunting fossil even more than hunting arrowheads.

So now to learn more I've joined a number of forums and the Dry Dredgers club out of Cincinnati.

Bad thing is with almost no fossils and no exposed rock that's not in a restricted quarry I'm among the most knowledgable in our area about fossils now. So I get tapped to show my collection for my son's school or local cubscouts. I love to do it but I rather take groups to Toledo or Cincinnati areas where they can dig too. One of my cubscouts found an outstanding prone Flexicalymine retrosa on the Sept Dry Dregers trip.

Des

[Uncle Siphuncle]

Des

I grew up in Cincinnati and found my first trilobite, an enrolled Isotelus gigas, at age 10 in 1980 at the Caesar Creek Spillway. That site seems a bit tapped out now for trilobites at least, but after hard rain many of the innumerable road cuts in the area give up good crinoid crowns, trilobites, and cephalopods if you are first on site. The Cincinnati area is great for fossils and I generally tack on some sort of collecting sortee whenever I run home to see family. Truth be told though, I'm glad I landed in Texas as the collecting variety is wonderful. Within a 300 mile radius of my house I can be in good Pennsylvanian, Cretaceous, Paleocene, Eocene, and Pleistocene exposures, both marine and terrestrial.

[Desmond]

Hehe I'm jelous but mabey I can find a way to visit some place come spring. I've only been able to hunt Ordovician -Devonian. I would love to be able to find other area to hunt. My son and I were talking about trying to find a way to make it out to the green river formation, but neither of us have much interest in the fish they have out there.

Caesar Creek is realy picked over for Isotelus but there is still a perty good supply of flexcalymine minus? the little tiny ones you find in conjunction with Zigospira brachiopods. I found them most commonly on the south side of the road about two thirds of the way back to the creek line.

I think I average about 20 Zigo for every Flexie from 2mm to about 2 cm wide everyone has been enrolled that I found intact out of there though. Another good outcroping for the smaller flexie minus was Indiana rt 1 at southgate hill. Just north of St. Leon about 5 miles. Down lower on the St. Leon site you find larger Flexie Retrosa and throughout you find fragmentary large and intact smaller Isotelus.

Is there an airport near to the North Sulphur River area, by the way?

[Gatorman]

Desmond if your ever in Florida stop by and see us we would be glad to take you for a swim.

[Uncle Siphuncle]

Desmond

The NSR is sort of in the middle of nowhere. The closest big airport I know of is DFW. The NSR is about 100 miles NE of Dallas. Paris is much closer but I don't know if you can catch a commuter flight there. The NSR is a classic Texas site (as are the Waco Pit, Hwy 21 bridge over the Brazos, Lake Texoma, Lost Creek Reservoir borrow pit at Jacksboro, Lake Brownwood Spillway, etc.) The most successful collectors at the NSR (and other sites) tend to work the hardest, show up first, and take a different approach than the rest of the crowd. I know of 2 at least partial mosasaurs being excavated on the NSR within the last 3-4 months. Pretty cool that stuff like this can still be found there.

An average trip there for people not terribly familair with the area such as myself includes, depending on what part of the river you hit, a couple mosasaur verts usually worn by being transported downriver by floodwaters, some shark teeth, 3-6 ammonites, lots of cool gastropods and Baculites sections, and occasionally a spear point. Guys with more experience there that get there right after a flood and spend more time in the offbeat feeder creeks than the main river channel often do much better than what I mentioned above. I know people with nice mammoth teeth, whole mosasaur skulls, etc.

[Mike Owens]

:Thumbs-up:

Right on!!

Mike

[Desmond]

On how to identify specific fossils I've found for the majority of my finds in Ohio I use two books:

Fossils of Ohio about 550pgs lots of pictures and diagrams. It's a must for anyone hunting the southwest of ohio though it does justice across the state. It has stratigraphy for several area's of the state as well as great info on stratigraphy basics. Ran about $35 awesome book it will lead you down to genus level on most anything you can find in the state.

Secondly I use to identify the actual layers I am working in at any given time Sampling the layercake that isn't: The stratigraphy and Paleontology of the type Cincinnatian Ohio Division of Gelological Survey Guidebook No. 13.

This one is somewhat more on the technical side but it's fairly straitforward and gives an overview of the layers accessable in Ohio and specific details on 11 sites. I used it on a visit to one site in perticular South Gate Hill in St Leon IN. It was very detailed and gives visual referances that make it easy to learn how to read the diagrams they use.

I found when I travel most places have either a club that can point you to books on their specific area or know a places you can find it.

For example when I went to Washington State this summer I poked around on the internet and found a number of great sites. Most of the best maps and directions I found were from other fossil hunters. I contacted the local group in Skagit County and they were great about helping me find and access public and private land for the trip. Down to giving me the combination to a parcel of land they lease for geode and leaf fossil hunting within the club.

Finding references on approxamate ages is a reletivly easy task, but when it comes time to try to identify which member or formation I start running into trouble unless I can root around my books long enough to find a map of the area. Formation and members are usualy fairly easy to identify when you learn what your looking for in Ohio it's ratio's of some types of brachiopods vs others that gives you the keys to them. Sometimes you can be mislead though because they are officialy noted off of things like condont populations etc.

Because for me it's an hours drive to get off the glaciated plain I do most of my fossil hunting from books and emails while I figure out the next trip I'm taking.

Hope someone else can give a bit better description of how to identify members and formations though cause I am not very good at it...

[Uncle Siphuncle]

Desmond

I grew up in Cincinnati and still think that most of the formations look the same. Its all gray whether shale or limestone. As you said the proportion of one to the other helps discriminate between formations. Texas makes this much easier in my opinion. Along with varied lithologies I'm used to seeing varied formation colors juxtaposed against one another. Then faunal differences are pretty obvious as well. I don't mess with forams but they too help tell formations and members apart down here.