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...over a few fields. With a bit of driving in between. Although spring has not officially sprung yet, I noticed that the farmers in my area are behaving like it's already arrived and are beginning to plow up some of their fields, so yesterday I figured I'd head out to the ones around Blumberg and Geisingen to see if their colleagues are doing the same. Sure enough, some of my favorite fields were freshly plowed. I also stopped in to the old clay pit just for nostalgia's sake. The productive layers there have been unreachable unter meters of debris for a long time now, but I managed to find a couple of weathered blocks which contained a few small ammonites. Prepping wasn't all that difficult, so I got most of the finds done today, although there are still a few bivalves to work on. Prorsisphinctes pseudomartinsi. ø8cm. Caumontisphinctes sp. ø 6cm. Pressastarte sp. 4,5cm. wide Ludwigella sp. Graphoceras decorum A small Prorsisphinctes sp. ammonite, Pygomalus ovalis echinoid and a rhynchonelloid brachiopod.

Autumn weather is on the move again, so the farmers are behaving accordingly and plowing up their fields. Time to go for a few strolls in the furrows of southwestern Germany. I was out last week and harvested a few things, although I wasn't quite sure about the quality, since the majority of them were mostly imbedded in matrix. I did give one of the stones a whack, though, which produced the following result: A Megateuthis sp. belemnite split in half with exposed phragmocone. I just had to reduce the excess matrix with my saw and do a slight bit of abrading. It's 12cm. long. The next one, the ammonite Bigotites (Prorsisphinctes) pseudomartinsi (7cm.) needed a lot of work to expose it. It is quite interesting, since I managed to free up the inside of the living chamber shell while leaving the inner whorls intact. There was actually more of the shell within the matrix, but unfortunately some of it was too brittle and broke away. The next two are bivalves. There was also a good portion of extraction involved with both of them. I decided to remove the Cucullaea (Idonearca) sp. (6.5cm. long) completely from the matrix in order to expose both sides, but I felt that the Myophorella cf. clavellata (8cm. long) looked better on matrix. A bit of shell is missing at the end but it's pretty well complete. A bunch of tube worms decided to colonize this one. The hinges are always nice on the family members of the Trigonioida, so I at least exposed them with the abrader.