Day Three We had started around 4 pm the previous day in "brach city," an area that is close to the small tributary. This is an ideal spot to find a lot of Spinatrypa spinosa, Mucrospirifer audaculus, Athryris sp., Orbiculoiodea sp., Pseudotrypa sp., Rhipodomella sp., and Mediospirifer... The shale here is very crumbly, so these ones pop right out of the matrix. Trilobite pieces can be abundant here, but very rarely complete (comparable to the high energy coral biostrome of the Hungry Hollow member). The Mucrospirifers can be quite fragile and a challenge to find intact, but we got a bunch. We filled a bucket and planned to spend our final half day before leaving just focusing on this area. It is also filled with crinoid stems, bryozoans, occasional pelecypods, and other marine bits. And thank goodness for easy pickings! My hammering arm was sore and my grip strength felt pretty weak. A bit of a mucky layer, but you can pick out the shells in these pieces, along with the impression of a Greenops cranidium and an Edredgeops cephalon. Not the most exciting picture, but it gives insight into what the layer looks like with all the brachiopods just waiting to pop right out. There are clustered areas in the layer where the bigger shells congregate, and this is one of them. A sweet and uncommon find in this layer: a full Eldredgeops rana that is very tough to find in these crumbly layers. Pictured on the right is what it looks like after some delicate work with a dental pick. We filled buckets with brachs. This is just one of them. We managed to collect about a thousand intact brachs. It will take me some time to clean and sort them all. A small pile of spirifers (Mucrospirifer and Mediospirifer). For scale, most of these are almost two inches wide. A small pile of Spinatrypa spinosa. Some can be quite large (about the size of a silver dollar) and came out either thin or plump, single or dual valved. A small pile of Pseudotrypa sp. They come out either somewhat flattened or very plump, a bit bigger than cherry tomatoes. Again, hardly representative of all the examples collected of each species, but cleaning and sorting of 1000 brachs will take time! We have here some Athyris sp., Rhipodomella sp., and another species I have to double check.
My next post will be the "aftermath" portion where I actually go through the large number of buckets filled with fossils, and get those to the prep table! Stay tuned... Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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