Very close to the month of May and starting to set up plans for some multi-day digs. April mostly saw me keeping things local, checking on my usual dump spots. So far, I've encountered about 13 distinct trilobite species in the field, but nothing complete or all that much worth bringing home. It isn't springtime in the southwest of Ontario without me finding a few Terataspis fragments, which is always exciting. I also bought a trilobite at the auction house from a fellow Ontario collector: No, it isn't a complete Bufoceraurus, but a complete one would likely require taking a mortgage out on my house. I've found fragments of this toad-like cheirurid in Manitoulin a number of years ago, but this remains the most complete example in the collection. At one of my rock dump spots in town, I was finding the usual Bois Blanc / Onandaga trilo-frags. This one was worth taking a photo of given the size and the nature of the shell. Good ol' Anchiopsis, always appearing as either pygidia or cephalons. Maybe one day I will be lucky to find a complete one, but I'm not holding my breath. The high chertiness of this kind of rock means everything shatters, sadly. It also likes to send sharp missiles to any exposed skin. It is mostly corals, which are the hardiest in terms of erosion, but every once in a while I might hit a sandier plane underneath them where some trilobite parts have washed in.
I should also say that I've been reading comments left by readers of this blog, and appreciate them (not the spam ones, though). My apologies for the comments not appearing or my delay in response, but the settings on this Weebly-powered blog seem a bit broken. I'm not sure how I can fix that, but rest assured I read and appreciate the comments. You can always leave me your email if you want me to get in touch, as I'm always happy to talk fossils. Well, it's just about May and time to start gathering my tools and make my way out and about. Apart from one course to teach for a week, and one workshop to run at month's end, I look forward to busting some rock in farflung places. I have designs on some Devonian sites, but mostly I will be focusing on the trilobite-rich Ordovician. I have a bit of a bucket list of specimens I'd like to add to the collection this year, so with effort and luck maybe I'll be able to cross them off. If I'm really lucky, maybe I'll find something new. We'll see what happens when I play the rock lottery. With the winter semester in my rearview mirror, I've been plunging face-forward into the fossil season, having been out a dozen days so far this year. I have yet to embark on more farflung, multi-day trips yet, but it is coming. 2023 promises to be a very different kind of collecting year. I will be aligning myself a lot closer to science than just merely collecting pretty things. To that end, I already am under a research project that is quite exciting, although it does not involve my true love of trilobites. The way I see it, I have until September to make as much use of this time as possible to get out in the field and do the work. I had a pretty fair day out at my Devonian hot spot yesterday. I was in the high energy horizons of the Dundee Fm, loaded as it is with rostroconchs, brachiopods, bryozoans, gastropods, some corals, and loads of trilobite... parts. Although I would be foolish to post any site photos or information, I can share some of the spoils. Starting with the abundant rostroconchs, we can see here that there is some species diversity in this material. Amidst the usual species in this material, Trypaulites calypso is not a frequent find. It might even get mistaken as yet another Pseudodechenella (which is, by far, the most numerous of trilo-parts in these rocks), except for a few notable differences: additional pygidial ribs is one, but the sagittal nodes (somewhat abraded off here, but still showing a bit of an arch) point to the right diagnosis. Not the best examples I encountered yesterday, nor from this site in the past, but representing here is Odontocephalus sp. (possibly new species). We have the trademark "cowcatcher" anterior cephalic projection on the left, the trademark pydigidal rostral fork on the right. I bumped into a ridiculous number of Coronura aspectans fragments. This is just a few I decided to take home. There was one rock where every split had evidence of this rare and fascinating dalmanitid. They could attain some pretty healthy size, too, topping out at up to 50 cm(!) None of these samples would have been even half of that, but they are all still of fairly robust size. I've got cheeks, eyes, and pygidia. Orphaned single thoracic segments were plentiful.
So, in all, a great day out in the field. So far, my encounter tally for trilobites is the following, from my field notebook: 1. Isotelus gigas 2. Pseudodechenella sp. 1 3. Crassiproetus crassimarginatus 4. Pseudodechenella sp. 2 5. Pseudogygites latimarginatus 6. Triarthrus eatoni 7. Anchiopsis anchiops 8. Burtonops sp. 9. Eldredgeops rana 10. Coronura aspectans 11. Odontocephalus sp. 12 Trypaulites calypso .I did neglect to mention that I got my hands on some old Craigleith material that must have been collected several decades ago. These were ridiculously loaded hash beds, so complete examples of our classic Canadian asaphid, Pseudogygites latimarginatus, were almost nonexistent, but I did find one scrappy complete and possibly a second under a sticky layer -- once my tools are fixed, I can try to confirm that. Also, an in-town trip may have netted a complete Pseudodechenella, but it will be a tough glue down job in hard, diagenetically reworked material, something I can get to and confirm when the tools are operational again. So, the season is on. My constant burning question remains: where to next? |
Kane Faucher
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