With the ending of spring and the arrival of summer, we've seen a blast of heat over the last while which makes collecting a bit of a challenge. Most collecting areas seem to be in full sun with no shade, and so I sometimes opt to go collecting in the mornings when it is slightly cooler. Trips to the hill out back have yielded some interesting and pleasant surprises. The hill (and pit) is composed of mixed Devonian deposits dumped there from around the region for the purposes of hill-building, so it is a mixed bag. Here we see a closeup of a prone Eldredgeops rana trilobite in a state of fairly good preservation. I spotted only a sliver of it in the rock and carefully went about splitting it to reveal what was inside. The lack of adequate laminations in the rock mean that there are virtually no convenient bedding planes to exploit, and thus the probability is very high that the rock will split in ways that can cleave right through the specimen. And that was the case here, resolved by binding the two pieces together. I've also found my share of a few weathered or semi-weathered out rollers, but they are sadly headless. Pygidium moults and shards of cephalon abound. Pictured here is the coral Syringopora. I generally pass corals and bryozoans over, but the weathered out lattice-like fenestrations were unique to any of the other corals I've seen in the area. My thanks to TFF user TqB for taking the initiative in showing this to Adrian Bancroft, an expert in bryozoans, to confirm identification that this is indeed a coral of the Syringopora species. Among my other finds in repeated trips to the hill, I don't have much more that is picture worthy. Having exhausted all the exposed, well-laminated shales, I've moved on with my trusty claw hammer and chisel to split some of the denser rocks - and the presence of trilobites inside makes it a thrilling rock lottery of sorts... And a lottery it certainly is, with about the same odds. What the site needs is to be turned over a bit to expose some of the rock buried under the dirt and clay, while some other areas will be better exposed come autumn when the weedy overgrowth thins out. I'm abandoning the inconvenient and awkward episodic approach to detailing fossil adventures by going blog-style. I have no plans to migrate previous (and interesting, I assure you!) content to the blog, but you can access the whole list here. Three years worth of finds. Since last year, I was able to take advantage of the El Nino temporary thaw to visit Arkona in January, revisited in late April (as well as my favourite pit near my house), and once again for a good three-hour stint in the south pit (here and here). Deb and I have much more focused on the north pit end, navigating the more treacherous terrain of fallen trees and slippery clay along the roaring river, and finding a gallimaufry of Greenops boothi trilobites in the fallen Widder shales. My recent visit was a poring over the exposed Arkona Formation and the overlying Hungry Hollow. Here are just a few of my finds from the May 15 outing. Deb and I will be making a trip to Ottawa next week, and I hope to reconnect with my old Billings Formation friends from childhood, so fingers crossed to add a few pseudogygites to my collection. I'm playing catch-up, so some of these photos will include a few London finds. Widder shale is VERY brittle, and so full specimens of the trilobite Greenops widderensis is a rare delight. Unfortunately, bedding planes are not so cooperative, and so parts of the trilobite got "stuck" in the impression to the left. Like I said, full specimens of old Greenops are hard to come by. Pictured here is a smorgasbord of mostly tail pieces (pygidium) and a few thoraxes. What I love about this species is the saw-tooth butts. These were definitely a defensive adaptation to increasing predation, alongside their tough chitin carapaces and ability to roll up into a ball like their cousins Eldredgeops. Just some interesting pieces: brachiopods and a gastropod. A closeup of the specimen on the far left appears below: This is the underside. Pardon my fingers. Spirifers (brachiopods). I must have buckets of these now. I should start selling them. Want to buy a fossilized shell from 350 million years ago? I got you covered. Closeup of some Greenops widdernesis fragments. Note how mineralization conditions may differ to give them a different coloured "patina." This is like a Paleozoic Benetton ad. This was at Boler. A clam, but a fairly large one compared to many of the specimens of its kind. As you can see, I have yet to graduate to a bona fide geological hammer. On my recent trip to Arkona, south pit, I just can't help picking up crinoid bits. Here you can note their diversity. Here is an assortment of cephalopods (bactrites) I plucked from the Arkona Formation. In the sunlight, their brassiness shines. An assortment of shells. Miscellanea. We have bryozoans, two button corals (Microcyclus), platyceras, and what I suspect on the far right top row to be a placoderm plate. On the bottom row a lot of fragments of the trilobite Eldredgeops rana.
Below: Ok, it's been a few years of ridiculously long hours in search of another Eldredgeops intact roller. I mean, a lot of people pick the place over. And it is not like I don't know what strata to target, or that I lack the eyesight or discernment (I've been known to pick out a single pleura from a distance of almost a yard, such is my hawk-eye ability for finding trilobites). After three hours, I was just about to give up. With five minutes until I would get picked up, I decided to just take a desultory and defeated look at some tiny outcrop of fragments. I figured it would be like the rest of the day ("coral, coral, coral, coral, crinoid stem, coral, coral, coral, brachiopod, coral, coral, coral x 1,000"). Up this point, I was only pulling out tiny fragments, mostly embedded in the wildly bioclastic Hungry Hollow rocks. I skipped the paper shales with their Leiorhynchus ad nauseam, ignored the sparsely fossiliferous parts of the HH Fm that never weather out and jut out like prows, knew better than to go digging in the Arkona FM slick grey clay, and turned my nose up at the dull (to me) bioturbated stones with all their worm burrows. Otherwise it was rugose coral everywhere. I really wish I could temporarily "delete" those coral to get a better view of other fauna. Anyway, just like when I found my first roller back in 2013 just minutes before I left, so I found this twisted fellow. The funny thing about trilo-hunting is that it seems an odd phenomenon that so many of us make our best finds either at the beginning or end of the trip. Anyway, here are some different angle shots to show how twisted this Eldredgeops is. It is *almost* complete (just missing the right bit of cephalon/eye and a tiny bit of the pustular glabella). |
Kane Faucher
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