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Showing results for tags 'galesburg shale'.
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Hi Everyone, I’d like to share a few posts on the shales I’ve been hunting recently in Kansas City, Missouri. Long story short – my neighbor is digging a ‘pond’ to China. He has massive equipment from his business and so far he’s dug through about 35 feet (~10.6 M) of material. My land matches his where the dam to the pond is and I saw shale in it which really surprised me since I’ve never found shale on my property. Even in the creeks and gullies. I would also like to say that I have been really inspired by the posts from @connorp and @deutscheben about the shale they find in Illinois and wanted to show a similar collection from a specific location/member in Missouri. Here’s a rough Lithology table of my area: The pond was dug through the Winterset Limestone member through the Stark and I believe through the Galesburg shale members and into the Bethany Falls Limestone from the top of the hill we both live on! It’s absolutely magnificent. I asked him if I could take some of the shale that he went through and all he said was, ‘take it all,’ and so I did. I passed on the limestone since its way more readily available to collect in the area and I hadn’t ever hunted through shale. I’ve gone through about 250 lbs (113 kg) of shale within the last few weeks and would like to sporadically present my findings as I can make time for it. Completely unrelated to his digging I listed and sold my house and land and am moving my family to Texas. All of this has happened within a month or so. I feel that this last hurrah into shale is a way for me to say goodbye to the state I’ve lived almost my entire life in thus far. Here’s one of my wheelbarrow loads of shale. I am no scientist but will do my best to assign at least some family or species to my finds. I love the adventure of findings fossils, prepping them can be therapeutic at times and insanely frustrating at others, and assigning species is my least favorite. Probably because I am not naturally good at it. If you see a species you feel is wrongly identified please feel free to share. It’s my weak point so I’d appreciate anything that helps me get better at it. The Galesburg layer is really hard to hunt from because it’s mudstone/claystone at the top then turns into harder grey shale at the bottom. It brakes vertically into rounded blocks instead of horizontally when you try to cut or split it and destroys the fossils that it contains. At the slightest addition of moisture it crumbles and the paper thin fossils are lost. This is a chunk of it I accidentally left out one night that succumbed to the dew from one evening and following morning. It’s filled with material I am having a hard time placing but I am calling it plant material until I can more accurately identify it. Unfortunately I didn’t get hunting till a few weeks after this layer had been dug out and the vast majority if it returned to mud. Without future ado, let me begin my adventure into Missouri shale. Here’s what I believe may be part of a Calamites plant. From what I am calling the Galesburg claystone. Scale in cm/mm. Here is another unknown that I believe is some type of plant stem. The Galesburg material is so much harder to deal with that I have a lot of it in storage now to go through at a later point.
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