Just returned last night from three heavy days of digging at Penn Dixie. My friend Malcolm and I likely cleared about 1500 square feet of area, working sun up to sun down. As Deb had to work, and I don't drive, it meant taking a train to a station en route to the border, with Malcolm picking me up along the way. Just getting started. A lot of the place has been peeled back, or otherwise under a heavy load of overburden. At this rate of excavation, the trilobite pit is already starting to encroach on the westernmost area near the nature path. As there were no easy benches, we had to create them. The next morning. As is usual for us crazy canucks, we work steadily in cracking out large slabs for about half the day, and then spend the remainder splitting them. This was what we left from the evening before, and then it was the same process again for almost 12 hours. We encountered a number of challenges. The rock was extremely dense and dry without the benefit of being saturated in water to facilitate bedding plane cracks. This meant our splits would more likely shatter rather than split through along any planes. A few potentially nice bugs were sheared through or shattered on account of the nature of the matrix. Also, cross-bedding made unlocking the slabs more difficult and time consuming, if not also a network of awkward (and sadly blank) domes underneath the layer. And yet another point on day 2 after removing some slabs for splitting. Here I am trying to lever out a stubborn slab with a small pry bar, with a pinch point bar to my right to keep the crack wedged open on a secondary slab. Sometimes a loose slab would be connected to adjacent ones, and so requires a bit of persistence and power to lift them all out in one go. We don't fool around. As members, we can access the site after public hours, and that is when we fire up the rock saw. Here we are scoring relief cuts in the very cross-bedded material. This nice little prone popped right out of the rock intact. Prones come at a higher premium than the much more common rollers. Just a small selection of the finds. We didn't do badly, but we've had better results in the past. The nature of the rock and area was a bit on the parsimonious side. And yet we still came away with quite a few trilobites. As I was taking the train back, I could only stow a few pieces (shown here) in my luggage; Malcolm will be passing through in a few weeks with a whole 5 gallon bucket of my finds. There is no doubt I could have come away with three times as much, but I was being far pickier in tossing away stuff that was incomplete or had no chance to be excellent. I'm really just trying to harvest enough prep material for the winter. The number of partials/incompletes we encountered probably number into the thousands. These two pieces show some promise. The little slab with the three-quarter profile will likely have some crush and distortion damage on its hidden side. The loose prone is missing a bit of pygidium that I can restore with a bit of milliput. Some other promising candidates that might lend themselves to some fancy prep.
Overall, despite some limitations, our hard work forced the stubborn rocks to give up whatever treasures it had. It's a challenge to sustain that effort over three days, and I can certainly feel the after-effects of it all today. I will try to get back to PD one more time this year just to beef up my winter prep inventory. I likely have another trip or two to Arkona to look forward to, and the autumn Bowmanville trip which will signal the close for the collecting season. Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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