The first step is admitting one has a problem! When Deb and I went to the Home Depot to pick up some foam to seal an area around the pipe, I found myself "wandering" over to the hammer section where I pondered whether to buy a 3' wrecking bar to supplement my smaller pry bar, a new cold chisel with a longer head, and a 4lb blacksmith sledge to go with my regular 4lb sledge. Deb played enabler by telling me I should get them. So I did. But that obliged me to try them out since we are planning to return to Penn Dixie in early October. So we went to Arkona's Hungry Hollow. And let me tell you that lugging that many pounds of tools and supplies around through a lot of brush and tough terrain ain't always easy! Making BenchesUnless one wants to be contented with surface collecting of whatever stuff may weather out of the cliff through the process of erosion, the only real and serious way to get at some very nice specimens is to carve slabs out of the wall for splitting. To do that, one has to create a "bench," which is like a long notch in the wall where one can sit and lever out slabs to the left, right, and down. So we were ready to get started on continuing a bench in the cliff face we found some months back, that we've been steadily extending. I worked a bit on an upper bench that I eventually connected to the lower bench, and created another even lower bench than the one Deb was working on. Having the 3' wrecking bar was making this a lot more efficient (but still back breaking work!). It isn't easy making benches, or even sometimes extending them - there can be a crazy amount of overburden clumped together and slumped over. I've had to go through several feet of the stuff in depth before hitting the actual wall. The other problem can be natural underground springs that leak through the shale, making it wet, muddy, and crumbly. There are plenty of fossils in those, but they just crumble or turn to mud. One has to go deeper into the wall to find dry shale. Once we were able to cut deep into the cliff face, we found that some of the more trilobite-filled layers were within about a 4 inch area. This picture hardly does any justice to how much rock and overburden was removed. This multi-level bench is aboout 3-4' deep, 7-8' high, and about 15' wide. At a few points I was able to exploit a major crack or fissure to send a few hundred pounds of debris and shale chips tumbling down. There are layers that are just choked with large spirifers. I found a few that had some nautiloids more commonly spread throughout. Here you can see the bench-build from two different angles. Again, it's difficult to really convey the amount of work we did. What does five hours of breaking rock get you? Well, for Deb, a full Greenops widderensis. Given the gazillions of moult pieces we keep finding in the Widder Formation, a full specimen is not common. And they are very delicate, so we took several precautions in transport back to the car. But, just to put the spotlight on Deb - this was her fantastic fossil find. And I'll end his post with just some recent pics as I try to organize some of the recent and past finds. The first is a tray with bays - on the left mostly complete prone and semi-prone Eldredgeops rana; in the centre my accumulation of crinoid stems and sections; on the right a hodge-podge of mostly complete rollers with one Crassiproetus marginatus(?) pygidium since I haven't found a home for it. The final image below is my fully prepped out double roller from Penn Dixie.
Comments are closed.
|
Kane Faucher
Archives
February 2024
|