Calling the season's time of death today on November 1. And so it is down field tools for 2019, and taking up the prep tools for winter (may it be short and merciful). Unless there is a miraculous change in weather to permit an encore, this is it. The next two weeks look like pre-winter is setting in, and the last two weeks of November are a bit of a write-off as the end of semester grading will suck up all my available time. In retrospect, it is tough to pin a qualifier on this collecting season; neither was it the best nor the worst. Like life itself, there were incredible moments/finds that punctuated a series of disappointments. Not that many new trilobite species were added to the collection this year, but the few added were nothing short of exciting. I ranged from the Ordovician to the Devonian. I’ll kick things off with this year’s disappointments first to get that out of the way. 1. My local honey hole that had pretty much ran dry the previous year had not produced anything new from weathering; in fact, it has been steadily overgrown since I first collected there in 2013. A few desultory visits during the spring mean splitting shards from my own previous trips. Tapped out. 2. Our upper Widder spot was quickly made off limits by mid-April. Fortunately, I did find a really nice and large placoderm dorsal plate before the window of opportunity slammed shut. As that spot was the regular go-to for our out-of-town crew (and fossil comrades who visit once a year), that put a major dent in options this year. This would be the first year since I started that there would not be a season to develop the site and extract Widder goodies. Also, extensive work at that location for so many years has pretty much made it unsafe and not so viable for excavation. We had to fall back on prospecting new areas, and defaulting to the Hungry Hollow Member, which is not exactly the easiest stuff to work with -- it's muddy, chunky, coral-infested, fragile or shattery. 3. The annual trip to NY at the end of April was brutally cold with sleet and snow. I also came up empty-handed from my trip to Deep Springs Road (apart from field comrade gifts, of course!). So no full Dipleura found. 4. A second trip in August to Penn Dixie did net a few buckets of material, but the exposed area for excavation was brutally hard, unweathered, and likely a point where the trilobites were pinching out laterally. It meant twice the work for half the haul. 5. A road cut in the Cobourg Fm that I prospected in July turned out to be a bust when exploring it in more detail in late September. 6. A second trip to Bowmanville, which is usually the capstone of the collecting year in autumn, was preempted by car trouble. 6. Plans to visit some very coveted private spots did not materialize for one reason or another. But it wasn’t all a bust, strikeouts, and skunked trips. I can count a few victories this season: 1. Finding one of the largest placoderm dorsal plates found in the Widder. 2. Plenty of improvement at the prep bench, in addition to new tools (PT Aro and ME-9100), new higher capacity compressor, and a top shelf camera. 3. Finding a perfect Flexicalymene croneisi prone specimen during the June Bowmanville trip. Finding them prone is rare as opposed to enrolled. 4. Prospecting that new spot near Nottawasaga Bay — even if it turned out to be an unproductive dud later on in the season. 5. Any and all time spent with field comrades from near and far: Malcolm, Greg, Kevin, Roger, Don, Paleo Joe, Tim, Jeffrey, Jay, James, and everyone else I broke rocks with this year. 6. Finding a nice, large cephalon of Eldredgeops southworthi in the Hungry Hollow coral-tangled muck-rock. We sourced the layers from a new, untouched spot (now pretty much tapped out). 7. Finding a new local honey hole on August 22 that was a real game changer that truly turned the season around. It is there that I pulled out my first Terataspis grandis fragments, and two nearly complete Pseudodechenella sp., in addition to a healthy number of Acanthopyge contusa, and a two examples of Mystrocephala stummi. 8. A fascinating trip to the type locality of the Formosa Reef member of the Amherstburg Formation, focusing on the windward flank netted plenty of goodies. 9. Not collecting-related, but I took to drawing trilobites seriously this year with substantial improvement — enough to have a few of them featured in The Trilobite Papers. 10. Compiling a master list of Ontario trilobites has become its own archivist’s passion. So, on balance, 2019 had its ups and downs with the “ups” cancelling out a lot of the “downs.” With more site closures and stuff tapping out, this was a year to forge ahead and explore new possibilities as opposed to being resigned in not letting the hammers ring. I didn’t buy many trilobites this year, which can account for the decline in species-adds this year. That being said, costs were still a bit high given new equipment and a few sunk costs on accommodations. Trip Totals (days): Local honey hole (old spot): 4 Local honey hole (new spot): 25+ Penn Dixie: 5 DSR: 1 Nottawasaga: 4 Arkona: 9 Bowmanville: 1 _______________________ (~50 days) (last year ~34) I was able to get out there more this year than last year despite a narrowing of site options. Now on to what I consider to be this season’s top finds: New species to the trilobite collection that were a result of my fieldwork include Pseudodechenella sp. (from the upper edge of the lower Devonian; not yet clear on which species, but they are distinct from other examples of the genus found later in the Hungry Hollow Member), Echinolichas sp., Acanthopyge contusa, Mystrocephala stummi. So that makes two new proetids and two lichids. So, like 2018, my self-collected tally for new species was 4. There may be more than that, but I would need to spend time with Lieberman’s text on proetids of Eastern North America to determine if I have any species variants of the many Crassiproetus pygidia I’ve collected from my Amherstburg material. This is a good time as any to feature all the Acanthopyge contusa heads and tails from my new local spot: As I also found genal spines (but no determinate thoracic segments), I sketched a quick reconstruction that perhaps I'll try to formalize as a better illustration in winter: In my dogged pursuit of long dead things, I shared my collecting spots with living things, too: And, O! the messes we will make. Some snaps of sites and fossil comrades breaking rock together. Now that fieldwork is at an end for 2019, it is time to start planning for 2020. Last year I didn’t plan as well as I could, which meant kind of starting off on the back foot. That, and a delayed spring and taking a few sites for granted, meant not optimizing on the time I usually have off once the academic year is over. So now begins a sitting down with the maps and to carve out the areas throughout Ontario that could use some pioneering work in exploration and prospecting, if not also visiting now forgotten spots.
I also received a lot of of great gifts from other collectors this year, and performed a lot of prep, but this end of year report is already fairly picture-heavy as it is. Although I don’t have a massive amount of material to prep for winter, I still have some work I can do. Perhaps it is just as well since in terms of time: I’ll be teaching a heavier load in winter in addition to taking a sunny holiday in February. There will be more blog posts in the off-season as I tend to get caught up in some fossil thing or another. Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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