A New Year Begins At Portland Point

[MarleysGh0st]

The mild weather has melted away the snow and let me take my first trip of 2013 to Portland Point (Middle Devonian, Moscow formation) yesterday.

My first impression was one of heartbreak. A group of other collectors have been visiting the site recently and prying up large amounts of shale. They're commercial collectors, I think, who are only interested in complete trilobites and leave everything else behind. On my own recent visits, I've been happy to go through their leftovers and find plenty to bring back to the Museum of the Earth's fossil lab. But what they've dug up since my last visit in early December has already been so weathered by the freeze/thaw cycles that it crumbles away in my hands. Such a waste!

I did manage to fill a bucket for fossil lab, mostly with brachiopod hash plates and partial trilobites. And I set aside these keepers for myself.

A nice Mucrospirifer mucronatus that detached from a piece of matrix I was working on, with only a little damage at the margins:

Modiomorpha concentrica, nested with an inverted spirifer:

And a block with one trilobite that might be complete. We'll see what a little prep work reveals: