Cretaceous Amber In Tennessee: An Open Report.

[Tennessees Pride]

Today i have decided on an open policy regarding the Amber which is to be found here in Tennessee. I don't mean i'm about to just outright say where it's at, but intend on sharing with the world a report on what it is associated with, and a general area it is to be found.

The motive behind this report is to publicly establish several special features about the outcrops i've discovered this Amber in. 1) That the Tennessee Amber site (s) are no doubt Lagerstatte quality 2) that the site (s) have a tremendous amount of associated botanicals just not found at other American sites as concentrated. 3) That the concentrations of Amber here are more than at other American sites. And 4) that this site (s) deserve to be appreciated and studied for what they are.

A thought has ran through my mind today as i happened to glance over at a nice sample of material here in the corner of my house collecting dust. That sample was collected 7months and 1 day ago today. I have decided to use it as the basis of this small report.

I have prepared an experiment to show step by step from opening up and revisiting this neglected stuff, to it's end and present what is there. This will take a few days to complete, so todays posts will be added to as progress is made. Within a week, i should be posting an end to this topic. Hope you all enjoy.

Now lets start with the sample. It was wrapped up in plastic wrap after collection on Oct.19th, 2013. After a few wraps, i placed the paper in it and finished covering the specimen up. It's weight that day on my fruit scales was 8.25 pounds. Today i pulled it out and weighed again....8.25 pounds. (I love that plastic wrap, you won't catch me hunting without a roll on me somewhere.) For todays objective, i weighed it again, opened it up, and gently broke apart the matrix (very small lignitic debris). As this was going on i photographed some of the Amber insitu, to show exactly what i'm dealing with here. Tried my best not to look for Amber,cause i knew i'd be there all day picking it out if i ever started. What seemed more important today was not to destroy any lignitic objects which might be valuable in aiding to identify the source (there may or may not be some in there that could do that.) But i do already have good botanics with Amber in the stems, ect. I even have specimens from other locations of leaves connected to stems,and Amber in those!!!! So here we go, let's start the pictures up....

Edited May 20, 2014 by Tennessees Pride

[Tennessees Pride]

These photos taken 10/19/13

[Tennessees Pride]

All the rest of the photos i upload were taken today,unless i specify.

[Tennessees Pride]

Gonna start posting a few pics of what the Amber looks like in the matrix...

[Tennessees Pride]

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[Tennessees Pride]

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[Tennessees Pride]

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[Tennessees Pride]

This is what 8.25 pounds of material look like after the preliminary seperation. The material now needs to dry some, where it will be workable better. I will add posts here as the process moves forward. Within a week, all should be completed with this sample.

[Tennessees Pride]

This was a few handfuls of material that i already had dried and ready for sort......upon sorting today, this is the amount of Amber that came out of the material....and i had already picked through it once awhile back....there should have been double the amber material in that small amount of matrix!!!

I have never removed enough material from site (s) to fill two 5gallon buckets yet,and the amounts of Amber in the material brought home is nothing short of astonishing. I could bring home Amber everyday if i wanted to, have just been caught up on big bones here lately.....i'm wanting some dinosaur bones BAD......maybe will find a few here pretty soon.

Have also found seeds, seed pods, and atleast one complete cone in the Amber matrix i have(though i can't with certainty say they belong to Amber producers.)

Edited May 20, 2014 by Tennessees Pride

[Tennessees Pride]

In this latest experiment, i will keep all these materials of this sample together, seperate the amber, weigh the matrix after drying,and weigh the amber collected from this particular sample...this should give an idea of concentration values and show how important this latest source of Amber is to science (among the other qualities the source possesses).

Edited May 20, 2014 by Tennessees Pride

[NZ_Fossil_Collecta]

those in-situ pictures had my mouth watering! you can't quite get that experience of it being embedded in the rock with kauri gum... as it's embedded in dirt.

[jpevahouse]

Your photos show amber consistent with amber I've found at the Sayreville, NJ Cretaceous site. A search on the internet provides some background about earlier Tennessee amber finds. This quote "Among the important early fossil discoveries in Tennessee was a possible candidate for the first known occurrence of amber discovered in the 1800s near Savannah, TN", also "Tennessee: the first known insect discovered in North American amber was here in 1917, identified as a caddis fly."

Apparently there is documentation concerning the presence of amber in Tennessee going back quiet a long time.

[Tennessees Pride]

those in-situ pictures had my mouth watering! you can't quite get that experience of it being embedded in the rock with kauri gum... as it's embedded in dirt.

NZ, my friend, tomorrow i hope to show you what all that little bit of lignite has to offer.

[Tennessees Pride]

Your photos show amber consistent with amber I've found at the Sayreville, NJ Cretaceous site. A search on the internet provides some background about earlier Tennessee amber finds. This quote "Among the important early fossil discoveries in Tennessee was a possible candidate for the first known occurrence of amber discovered in the 1800s near Savannah, TN", also "Tennessee: the first known insect discovered in North American amber was here in 1917, identified as a caddis fly."

Apparently there is documentation concerning the presence of amber in Tennessee going back quiet a long time.

Hey there Jerry. You're right there sir, all i had meant was that this is a source,as no one in the past, mr. Bruce Wade included, had ever been able to consistently find Amber here....only sporadic finds. True enough, amber is to be found in several different layer types that i know of (sand,clay,lignite,ferrocrete, ect.), but there's only one good source that has it in quanity,i can promise you that, and it's not in any other county than Henderson county. Oh, i've banged out Hardin county good looking for the same source....it's not there...that's why mr. Wade never found it. It's not in Decatur, Chester, or McNairy counties either....strange. What everyone else have found is the nuggets, what i've found is the vein (so to speak).

[jpevahouse]

Hey there Jerry. You're right there sir, all i had meant was that this is a source,as no one in the past, mr. Bruce Wade included, had ever been able to consistently find Amber here....only sporadic finds. True enough, amber is to be found in several different layer types that i know of (sand,clay,lignite,ferrocrete, ect.), but there's only one good source that has it in quanity,i can promise you that, and it's not in any other county than Henderson county. Oh, i've banged out Hardin county good looking for the same source....it's not there...that's why mr. Wade never found it. It's not in Decatur, Chester, or McNairy counties either....strange. What everyone else have found is the nuggets, what i've found is the vein (so to speak).

Your photos show particularly large examples compared to others I've seen. Very good find indeed! The problem with validating finds is not all examples of fossils are in museums or public institutions, many in private collections. My interest in early mammals led me to wonder why mastodon remains are regularly found here in NJ but mammoth remains are rare. I could only validate less than half a dozen specimens of mammoth molars found in NJ. Even of the two or three examples donated to the NJ State Museum one is of suspect origin. A collector I met who dives along the NJ coast when asked insisted there were a lot of mammoth molars found along the coast. The problem is where are they? There is no documentation or reports to validate his claim, nor do other collectors support his claim. It's important to carefully document finds if we want to give them credibility.

This is one area where amateurs and professonals sometimes collide. There's a kind of scientific chaos to collecting that can be hard to control.

Edited May 22, 2014 by jpevahouse