Tell me something cool: A fossil

It looks like I'm not the only one on these forums with an interest in fossils. Growing up in upstate NY I found a lot of brachiopods (they were everywhere) as well as trilobites and horn corals. In other areas of the country I have accumulated a lot of crinoid stems (sadly never a complete crinoid), ammonites (including a big one over a foot in diameter), baculites, etc. I have been to the famous Antelope Springs trilobite location in Utah a couple times, and the trilobite location near Cadiz, CA once. The only vertebrate fossils I have found are bone fragments from the Brushy Basin member of the Morrison Formation (Jurassic dinosaur bones) near Green River, UT.

I just wish there were some good fossil beds near here, I am interested mainly in Paleozoic and Mesozoic, and the only fossils anywhere near here are Cenozoic. I have to drive a long way to find anything older. When I lived in NY, MO, and UT it was easy to find good fossils everywhere.
 
I went fossil hunting in the shales of upstate new york with one of my buddies.

It was mostly trilobites. We found dozens of large fossils in a few hours time by splitting slabs of shale around a river. This guy is about 2 inches long and seems to be missing his head:

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We found a bunch of the heads too, but they were all rather small. Based on the head, they were all Triarthrus trilobites.

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lambertiana said:
It's a brachiopod. I used to find a lot of brachiopods that looked just like that in upstate NY, those were Devonian. If you ask around you will be able to find out the geologic period that particular formation is. They were very common during the Devonian through Permian, but most species died out during the Permian-Triassic extinction (which made the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs seem like kid's play). A few species of brachiopods survive today.
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I have a complete specimen very similar to that one and I'm often tempted to make a tie tack out of it (though I RARELY have the occasion to wear a tie).

The area where I live has some fossils and I'm sometimes tempted to carry along a mason's hammer when I'm grouse hunting because it always seems I find some interesting formation I'd like to chip at in search for fossils.

Here, my buddy is poking around under an interesting formation, looking in the dirt for loose fossils.

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I happened to look up at the exposed layer above his head... it was completely covered with fossils!

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They are fossilized burrows of some type of sea worm.

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The state museum has a large specimen that I believe was collected at the same location.

Stay sharp,
desmobob
 
whoa very cool!

i'm curious as to where Munky88 found his fossil, perhaps we should go fossil hunting !
 
I've got a few decent fossils , I see them all day every day of the week ! I'm a coal miner & the top inside the mine is covered with fossils, looks like fern branches & tree limbs, sometimes I see what looks like a snail shell. Wonder why I never see any critter fossils ? :confused:
 
coaldigger said:
I've got a few decent fossils , I see them all day every day of the week ! I'm a coal miner & the top inside the mine is covered with fossils, looks like fern branches & tree limbs, sometimes I see what looks like a snail shell. Wonder why I never see any critter fossils ? :confused:
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I'll only speculate as I am mostly a retooled hard rock geologist, but the coal probably was in terrestrial or shallow water terrestrial environments of deposition, such as a bog or swamp. Anything with woody vegetative matter that got covered up quickly under oxygen poor conditions. You'll probably get better answers than I can detail right now if you google formation of coal or something like that.:D

The fossils in the posts above are mostly in shallow seas or oceans, in limestones deposits. It would have to be in a warm, shallow sea for the most part because there's a limit to which the calcium carbonate can sink before dissolves (carbonate compensation depth) , I believe it's no more than 4-5 kilometers.
 
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