My ".com" Fossil Boom

I love the internet,

even though I'm still not very good at surfing it.

I recently went on a long road trip from Florida to Missouri and used the internet to locate fossil possibilities along the way.  I thought I had everything planned out until I stopped for my midmorning nap in the back seat of my truck outside of Valdosta, GA.  Instead of snoozing, I started surfing only to locate a potential fossil shale site a few hours north of me in Trenton, Ga.  The detour  took me a out an hour out of my way so I skipped the nap and got back on the road.

The first challenge is FINDING the fossil site.

The directions for this site were fairly precise but I still had to stop and ask some locals where the road was.  Then I was supposed to look for an old sign for the Durham Coal Co.  As luck would have it, that sign has now been replaced with this sign:

Doesn't get any more specific than that!

I pulled off the road and got out to see what was what.

A very short walk from the truck was a hillside littered with shale.  It's obvious that a lot of people, probably a lot of students, come here regularly to dig shale chunks out of the old coal mine spoil piles in search of fossils.  

My turn!

The website said I could find plant fossils deposited between the Cambrian and Pennsylvanian periods (504-300 million years ago) and all the shale tumbling down the hillside contained what looked like compressed palm fronds as in the rock in the photo above.

I wanted more variety so I started digging.  I quickly realized I needed to target the tan shale as opposed to the black shale which gave me an impressive peak into that ancient world.

All the shale was exceptionally fragile.  The layers were more folded than flat and didn't want to break cleanly and the rocks were very soft.

I collected a nice stack of rocks and was back on the road in a couple of hours.

When I finally returned home and sorted my fossils, I thought I would just get on the internet and ID a few of these plants.

Why won't the internet hand me the answers I seek on a silver platter?!!!

It really is fascinating to read about how the oxygen levels were so different in the Paleozoic and how it helped shape which plants and animals evolved during that time.  A whole catalogue of plants that are now extinct.  Lots of ferns, primitive trees, and rushes but too many for me to easily ID any of my little fossils.  

That's ok.

I'll just enjoy them as they are and continue to keep stuffing info into my brain until something clicks.

At least I didn't run into an internet site proclaiming the plants were brought here by aliens, although I'm sure such a site exists.