With the winter semester in my rearview mirror, I've been plunging face-forward into the fossil season, having been out a dozen days so far this year. I have yet to embark on more farflung, multi-day trips yet, but it is coming. 2023 promises to be a very different kind of collecting year. I will be aligning myself a lot closer to science than just merely collecting pretty things. To that end, I already am under a research project that is quite exciting, although it does not involve my true love of trilobites. The way I see it, I have until September to make as much use of this time as possible to get out in the field and do the work. I had a pretty fair day out at my Devonian hot spot yesterday. I was in the high energy horizons of the Dundee Fm, loaded as it is with rostroconchs, brachiopods, bryozoans, gastropods, some corals, and loads of trilobite... parts. Although I would be foolish to post any site photos or information, I can share some of the spoils. Starting with the abundant rostroconchs, we can see here that there is some species diversity in this material. Amidst the usual species in this material, Trypaulites calypso is not a frequent find. It might even get mistaken as yet another Pseudodechenella (which is, by far, the most numerous of trilo-parts in these rocks), except for a few notable differences: additional pygidial ribs is one, but the sagittal nodes (somewhat abraded off here, but still showing a bit of an arch) point to the right diagnosis. Not the best examples I encountered yesterday, nor from this site in the past, but representing here is Odontocephalus sp. (possibly new species). We have the trademark "cowcatcher" anterior cephalic projection on the left, the trademark pydigidal rostral fork on the right. I bumped into a ridiculous number of Coronura aspectans fragments. This is just a few I decided to take home. There was one rock where every split had evidence of this rare and fascinating dalmanitid. They could attain some pretty healthy size, too, topping out at up to 50 cm(!) None of these samples would have been even half of that, but they are all still of fairly robust size. I've got cheeks, eyes, and pygidia. Orphaned single thoracic segments were plentiful.
So, in all, a great day out in the field. So far, my encounter tally for trilobites is the following, from my field notebook: 1. Isotelus gigas 2. Pseudodechenella sp. 1 3. Crassiproetus crassimarginatus 4. Pseudodechenella sp. 2 5. Pseudogygites latimarginatus 6. Triarthrus eatoni 7. Anchiopsis anchiops 8. Burtonops sp. 9. Eldredgeops rana 10. Coronura aspectans 11. Odontocephalus sp. 12 Trypaulites calypso .I did neglect to mention that I got my hands on some old Craigleith material that must have been collected several decades ago. These were ridiculously loaded hash beds, so complete examples of our classic Canadian asaphid, Pseudogygites latimarginatus, were almost nonexistent, but I did find one scrappy complete and possibly a second under a sticky layer -- once my tools are fixed, I can try to confirm that. Also, an in-town trip may have netted a complete Pseudodechenella, but it will be a tough glue down job in hard, diagenetically reworked material, something I can get to and confirm when the tools are operational again. So, the season is on. My constant burning question remains: where to next? Comments are closed.
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Kane Faucher
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February 2024
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