Deb and I are set on our first trip to Blasdell, NY's world-famous Penn Dixie site. Two solid days of prying, cracking, and splitting - with hopefully enough fine trilobite specimens to show off, and a lot of matrix to play with in the winter to come. Since my last post, I managed to make it out to Arkona two more times, as well as the Boler pit twice (finding my second specimen of a Paraspirifer acuminatus). I didn't manage to find anything all that spectacular, so will not be showing more pics of the same stuff you've already seen. But the temps are climbing back down to more comfortable and reasonable levels as autumn makes its stealthy approach ( the leaves, they are a-turnin'!). I am also about to purchase a Dremel stone engraving tool to practice freeing some trilobites that are embedded in matrix. This should be good practice for whatever big chunks of matrix I can bring with me from over the border. But why not a few pictures in the interim? Here are some select images from the digital microscope aimed at some Arkona finds, and a confirmed Proetus alpenensis(?) - or crassimarginatus(?) Just a closeup of a Bactrites nautiloid Tentaculites are neat and taxonomically perplexing! Goniatites up close and personal, an ammonoid. Not my best example, as I've been pulling ever more out recently. Say hello to my little friend, the newly confirmed species of trilo in my collection, Proetus. Why have I included this Eldredgeops rana cephalon fragment in the mix, pulled from the Boler pit and keeping company with a bunch of ne'er-do-well spirifers? Well, because of size. Although this is likely just a moult, this is proof of a rather big boy. Using a kind of averaged out ratio calculation for this species, I figure that the full size would have been about 3 inches, cranidium tip to pygidium tail. I exhausted the rock this one came from in search of just one other piece of the moulting, but to no avail. Alas.
Stay tuned in the weeks to come when I put up our finds from Penn Dixie, and possibly some first attempts at specimen prep! As always, thanks for reading! As summer draws to a close, I can expect the wasps to be out in full force for about a month until the trees all start turning. If that most precious commodity of time permits, I'll be spending a part of the autumn going on various fossil expeditions. But I thought for today's post it would be nice to look at my burgeoning collection. This is not, by any stretch, the entire collection. I am just slowly populating these new and nifty containers Deb bought me. This pic shows off a few nice pieces. In the left bay are mostly bryozoans and corals I haven't really sorted yet, and a smaller container of crinoid bits. The middle bay is still a WIP. The bay on the right sports my collection of trilobite rollers and a small container of combined goniatites and tornoceras. These bays are a few inches deep. Pictured here are my assortment of brachiopods - mostly spirifers with a few other species. And this is not all of them. I probably have close to a thousand of them now. This is my "to sort" pile. You can see plenty of crinoid stems, the odd pygidium of a trilobite, and a few examples of the "button coral" microcyclus.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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