West Virginia: Fossils May Trump Arrowheads

I should have known.  

Why wouldn't there be fossils in West Virginia?

I headed up in early May for my 4th annual visit to beautiful rural West Virginia where, normally, I spend my time drinking G&T's on my friend's relaxing front porch, and combing her fields for tiny arrowheads.  

These manmade fossils are a little rough and clumsy compared to the photos I've seen of most points but in their defense, the local ancient native Americans didn't have great rock to work with.

Clumsy or not, I love finding them!

I really hauled them in this year.  The 5 in the above photo were found in less than an hour in a small area.  I told my friend I had a feeling about that corner of her field.

Another exciting manmade fossil find was a pre-Revolutionary war coin!

This was in an area of a field that has broken bits of crockery and glass so there may have been a homestead there at some point.

But it seems like there should be "fossil" fossils there...

We were driving back from a visit to a friend when I spied a dug out section of a hill next to the road.

"Might we please pull over for a few minutes so I can see why people have been digging there?"

I scouted around and quickly saw that the red colored stone was filled with brachiopods and impressions that looked like screws which I later learned were left by tentaculites.

Tentaculites, or "drywall screw fossils" (my own pet name for them) are, per Wikipedia, "an extinct genus of conical fossils of uncertain affinity."

I was in some Devonian rocks.

I like brachiopods but they're not my favorite fossil so I was about to retreat to the car

 when I saw this on the ground:

Uh...that's a piece of a BIG trilobite!

I know some trilobites were huge but the biggest ones I'd found to date were from Delta, UT and topped out at about the size of a quarter.  This West Virginia "bug" was 4" across.  In my mind, this was a discard since it was laying out in the open so I could only fantasize about the beautiful specimens fellow fossil hunters were keeping.  I scanned the area and quickly found a smaller specimen and then it was time to go.

Tom promised to return with me the next day, armed with chisels, hammers and a pry bar so that I could load up with trilobite beauties.

Alas...it wasn't that easy.

I tried and tried but couldn't find even a single specimen.

I found tantalizing fragments: single bands from large trilobites.  I also found 2 specimens that were small and crushed inside the rock.  The rock was different from anything I'd worked with, too.  It's a super soft sandstone rock that doesn't split along a clean line.  Hard to reveal fossils but extremely easy to remove in order to reveal the few brachiopods I collected.

I feel like there is a secret to finding the trilobites and I just need to know what it is.  I have a year before my next visit so I'll research the problem before then.

This area would be a dream for brachiopod enthusiasts.  The specimens were varied and many still had nacre,

and as mentioned, they are super easy to chip out of the rock.  It's not even chipping;

 I used an old X-acto knife blade to scrape the rock away from the shells.

Tom found a couple of gastropods.

This had an extremely delicate tip on the small end of the curl that chipped off while I was handling it and then I couldn't find it to glue it back on.  Bummed!  Next year, if I find another, I'll stabilize it before I do any prep work.

So, while disappointed by my first West Virginia trilobite hunt,

I still have this boss mid-section,

and the determination to research the why's and how's so that next year, I have

SUCCESS!

I'm now going to add, in order to increase my word volume, a verse of a country song Tom and I wrote while weaving through the precarious West Virginia mountains on Hwy 33.

Anyone wishing to record it, we will be easily bought out for a pittance.

"The night my brakes went out on 33,

I had a little talk between God and me,

I said, "Lord, if you'll just tap my brakes,

I'll repent for all my past mistakes."

The night my brakes went out on 33."