Finally Got Out

[John K]

We finally got out to do some digging this last weekend. I took the kids to the pit we had explored earlier this summer, the one where 30 years ago I had found a small shark tooth:

Return to Shark tooth Pit

Finding a Cretaceous Shark Tooth in Wisconsin is a rare thing(!), but we were hoping to find another despite the odds. While we did find some sandstone that by all appearances was Cretaceous in origin:

we didn't find much in the way of animal remains. But the kids did have fun digging around, and found some bryozoan stems and crinoid pieces.

We then made our way over to a more typical exposure, a roadcut showing a wide swath of St. Lawrence dolomitic siltstones. We were once able to find without much effort parts and pieces of the trilobite Dikelocephalus, but the exposure has been worked for years by school groups and is at a point now where there isn't much left. We need an earthquake or something.... Once again, the kids had fun banging around

We didn't find much for bugs, but my son did find a plate of what I thought at first were Otrocodes, but they are much, much too big (about 1/2 inch). Maybe they are Trilobite eggs - anyone willing to guess?

We then hit a spot that is a huge exposure of St. Peter Sandstone. The St. Pete is made up of poorly cemented sandstones, but in a few exposures you can find large plates of shell layers, and if you're lucky, a cephlapod or two. We found a couple of small plates, but the mosquitoes were extremely bad so we didn't stay long.

On the way out, we saw these guys across the road

[Seldom]

Those look like my sand hill cranes tell them to come home summers almost over.

Nice finds kids had FUN thats what it is all about.