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Permian shale in Manhattan, KS


trisk

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We moved to Manhattan, Kansas two years ago but I never tried looking for fossils in the area until last week. This is in the Flint Hills area so lots of Permian shale and limestone everywhere. We visited a 20-foot cliff behind the Manhattan Aquarium Co building at the southeast edge of town, and picked up a lot of loose sheets and blocks of bearing lots of fusinilids and brachiopods.

 

We found an interesting chunk resting halfway up the cliff with large curved pieces which I was pretty excited about since it looks like bone at a glance, but they might be bryozoan colonies since they're too evenly covered in tiny pores (we did find clam shells that had similar colonies on their surface but it was patchier).

 

There's a small object (shown first by the quarter) in the same matrix almost completely exposed. It looks symmetrical along a center axis but has a strange indentation in the middle, with the sides actually folded in and what appear to be seams. It seems too complex to be a brachiopod shell.

 

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A nice find from lower down was an extremely rich matrix with a lot of shells, fusilinids, and crinoid bits.

 

There's a dark object near the corner that looks like part of a trilobite?

 

There's another object in this I can't identify, shown in the last two photos above the Y-shaped bryozoan piece. It consists of a straight stick with regularly spaced branches or openings on both sides. It could be a cross section of a spiral but I would expect the sides to be offset from each other more. I'm not sure if it's attached to the flat piece at one end.

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Yes, they're various bryozoans and it does look like a brachiopod in the first specimen.

 

Second specimen - it does look like a trilobite piece but the image is a bit small to be sure. The branched object looks like a piece of Penniretopora or similar, another bryozoan.

Tarquin

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Better shot of the apparent brachiopod (it does resemble a less complete shell a couple inches away). The way the shell is deformed in the center and the sawtooth edge was confusing me.

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Took more photos of the trilobite part and the bryozoan piece, in better lighting the latter looks like it has a curved exterior line.

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No doubt about the trilobite pygidium now. I'm not quite sure about the Penniretopora-type bryozoan, it could be something else. It's hard to tell if the outer curved bit is attached, looks like a bryozoan though.

 

Nice hash plate by the way!

Tarquin

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