Spent another four hours at the new site, mostly probing the rocks and getting a feel for which layers will be the most gainful. There are some rocks that are just so filled with large brachiopods at the expense of anything else (except maybe a few Pseudodechenella sp. pygidia), and others that are almost all rostroconchs. This image and the closeup gives some indication of the typical beds that come out, sheet after sheet, of almost exclusively brachiopods of mostly decent size. Some of these rostroconchs attained to a fairly robust size. All but the specimen on the right popped out of the matrix. I neglected to take a photo of a few layers where they were so numerous that they were stacking on top of each other. What the size and abundance of these confirms for me is that the deposition environment was shallow, turbulent, and open marine. Some rostroconchs could attain a length of 15 cm. This I bucketed earlier in the day, and were not the biggest I encountered. Gastropod steinkerns. Some could be fairly substantial in size, but extracting them from the host rock when they are of any decent size is a major difficulty. These brachiopods are quite large and plump. The photo does not convey their rotund aspect very well, but picture crabapples or large kiwis. Not as big on the bugs this trip (discounting the zillions of small Pseudodechenella tails!). Two fragments of Odontocephalus sp. The one on the right is an impression, but shows the eye and a bit of cheek. This genus is particularly hardy, and was able to persist in some less than hospitable environments that other bugs could not tolerate. Anchiops anchiopsis tails. The piece with the double initially appeared as four on the same undulating plane adjacent to a plane that was very jointed. Sadly, the other two were in pretty poor shape and not worth bringing home.
I'm not done yet. I hope to get out again very soon and so a solid day's work on this stuff. Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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