The month of January flew by pretty quickly, and I can only account for one adventure during that month. Now the month has passed and February 2022 has come and gone as well! As I write the entry for the month of February there isn't much to scream about either. I had hoped it would have a better outlook, but the unseasonably warm to freezing cold and back again with rain several days a week! It's that time of year, what did I expect! We gotta get off this merry-go-round of weather changes!
Our first trip was to the state of Mississippi to hunt Cretaceous Period marine fossils. Three days before the Saturday, it had rained and you'd think there was sufficient time for ground to dry out... we arrived on site to a gorgeous, blue skied day, but we were totally wrong! We stopped by another site before we arrived at this one, we got out of the truck to encounter very wet to frozen Mississippi mud! We decided to come back later and went to the main second site. It was a mud bog too, the surface mud had to be at least two inches thick! The soil was so saturated with water as you can tell in the photo above and below. The ground soil is usually a white to light gray in color. Mud caked our shoes weighing us down making it hard to traverse the terrain!
You had to watch your step because there was so much mud you would slip and fall into that muddy mess. To add insult to injury... I mean literally, the entire area was saturated with tree-like briers on the hillside. If you were to fall and grab one of them on the way down you'd be in a world of hurt, that's for sure! That mess made it hard to do any kind of surface hunting although the gang found fossils.
We soldiered on and did find a few cool finds. I found a bunch of Clam Steinkerns, fossilized Clam Shells, Crab Carapaces, and one in particular that is a hash plate. There is a piece that looks similar to a nautiloid but maybe a piece of crab??? Nothing of great significance was found but what you see here were keepers. The day went by quickly and the cold breeze was picking up, so we decided to depart the site and head home. We did make one last stop at the first site. We found that the mud was still there and probably worse than what it was this morning. My shoes were caked with so much mud it looked like I had snow shoes on. Pretty pathetic!
I did find a huge Exogryra larger than my palm, and two small Pyncnodonte Oyster shells. The fossil to the left of the Pyncnodonte shells is a steinkern, mold of a nautiloid fossil called a Eutrephoceras? I was happy with what I found that day and wished it could have been drier but hey, not all days will be perfect.
En route home be bopping down the interstate with my hunting buddies, the Gorgas Steam Plant sihouetted against the setting sun was a highlight for the day.
Our second trip for February 2022 was with a local paleontology group. We went to the site in North Alabama to hunt for Carboniferous/Mississippian marine fossils. My gang was there three weeks before. The day started out overcast, then cloudy and at times the sun attempted to pop out between them but in the end stayed behind the clouds during this visit, the wind blowing off that lake made it was a chilly one to boot!
Our first stop was site not visited a lot and as I'm walking down the shoreline I see this big brown object on a very large limestone slab that stood out like a sore thumb! The slabs of stone are beige in color and the fossil was a dark brown. The slab was big and I didn't want to lug that thing back up to the truck, so I attempted to knock off the excess. It's a fossil right? Most images are pretty secured to the rock or, so I thought? When I tried to knock off the excess the tooth broke into the four pieces and fell to the ground where there were a gazillion rocks to blend in with! I managed to find two of the pieces and the others, not so much! The fossil was a very worn tooth of an ancient Carboniferous/Mississippian Period shark called a Saivodus.
We went to another site where I intended on gathering hash plates to donate to school classrooms. While walking around the bend of the shoreline I see a flock of turkey buzzards lounging on the point ahead making my way to them... I wasn't watching what I was doing and my knee buckled and I collapsed backwards... fortunately for me there were no large rocks behind me when I fell because at the time was alone! I got up my knee was gimpy putting a slight damper of rest of the hunt.
I sat my butt down on the shoreline in a no wind zone and picked through the slabs to find my hash plates. Little did I know at the time I found hash plates with some interesting keeper images on them! A large trilobutt, third picture and a portion of the trilobite called a 'genal spine'... looks like a hook at the top in the first picture, belonging to that of a Kaskia chesterensis Trilobite! The gang wanted to go to a third site, so I made my way to the truck very carefully paying attention where I put my foot!
One of the discoveries that day was a really cool Colonial Coral fossil that features a cross section! On the one side you see the hexagonal image of the coral and when turned it over there is a cross section of the coral, soooo cool!
When we got to the second site, my favorite thing to do is sit down amongst the rocks and pick through them finding lots of horned coral, crinoid segments and brachiopod steinkerns. I told my hunting buddies that if I had the sunlight above me I could sit here all day to find these treasures! The trip to this site isn't complete unless there are Blastoids to be found... I found two, woohoo!
Well, the month of February came to a close in its usual fashion with the merry-go-round of weather conditions. We made two memorable trips during the month with some really cool finds. What does the month of March 2022 hold? Lots of fossils I hope? C'mon March!
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