Random Stuff

[John K]

I love this site! It's the perfect impetus to get me to do something that I've wanted to do for years: organize my collection and document it photographically.

While I don't get out half as much as I'd like, and northern Wisconsin is sort of a dead sea when it comes to really cool fossils, and I don't buy any specimens (preferring to find them myself or go without...), my collection is modest, but I do have a couple things that stand out (sort of...)

We find cephalapods fairly regularly:

Decorah Shale


Highly squashed Prairie Du Chien specimen


I remember finding my first Conularid and thinking it was a fossil fish
This one is from the Maquoketa limestone in Minnesota:



I mis-identified this thing for years - it's a silaceous sponge (Receptaculites, I believe) from the Ordovician Galena formation in Iowa. Not a perfect specimen, it's notable in that I found it on a business trip through the area. We had stopped at a McDonalds for a bite to eat, and I spotted it in the landscaping out next to the parking lot. As we walked back to the company van, I grabbed it, dusted it off, and shoved it under the seat....



this is a piece of bone from the Hell Creek formation, just out of Forsythe MT. I've got lots of pieces of "float", but this one stands out (IMHO): lots of surface impressions of blood vessels, and what appears to be a large blood vessel channel running through the "back":




this is the "back" - you can see a large channel, with fiberous attachement scars running down it's length



It's very thin, about an inch or so - Triceratops frill? Dare to dream...

We've got plenty of gastropods around, but I've only found just one operculum



I went for a long time without ever finding a trilobite, but once I found one, I've found a lot of them:



Dikelocephalus head spine St. Lawrence:



and a very cool mirror image tail:



cephalon from the St. Francis sandstone - not normally present on the surface in Wisconsin, except for a small upthrust nearby:



We've got some Isotelus around, from the Maquoketa again:

Small ones -


and big ones

Edited March 7, 2014 by John K

[tracer]

hmm...cool fossils, and nice closeups. the piece of bone you found doesn't look like any i've seen, so maybe it is something like frill or something. sure hope that organizing and documenting stuff isn't contagious...

[Guest solius symbiosus]

Nice stuff! That first trilobite pictured... is that a ventral of the cephalon??? Too, the Conularia, nice! In all my years of collecting, I have only found a few from the Ord.

I pull a lot of nice Isotelus gigas from the local rocks. Look for the threads started by me in this link to see a few of them.

[Guest guppy-boy]

Very nice