Animations: the good, the bad, and the naughty

I'm not name dropping

as that would be a violation of my ex-sister-in-law's privacy

but I have been mentioning that she is a geologist in the hopes of getting a little

 street-cred-by-association in the fossil world.

I'll take it any way I can get it!

The main benefit of our relationship, besides getting to associate with a wonderful, intelligent person, is that she willingly answers every inane question I think of while playing Candy Crush at 1AM.

"How long does it take a fossil to form?"

"What is an agate?"

"Why is coal black?"

...ad naseum...

My latest fixation is petrified wood so I asked her for a link to a good teaching animation illustrating the process of petrification.  My own Google searches had exposed me to some fairly horrifying results including Japanese anime and porn.

Her links were better but by no means fool-proof.

The absolute best of the bunch had a high production value with a fabulous animation sequence but at the end of the video the announcer declared that all animals alive today are exactly the same as they were millions of years ago.  That statement and the Arabic lettering at the end of the video sounded my warning bells so I researched the producer and found out that he is a proponent of Islamic creationism.  

Heavy sigh...

My geologist ex-sis-n-law stated it best when she said,

"I hate it when science gets highjacked."

So just enjoy the amazing beauty of this piece of petrified wood I found in northern Arizona and be satisfied with dry texts describing its formation...

Including the following dry text that I pieced together to describe the formation of

Eden Valley petrified wood from Wyoming:

I was recently looking through my fossil cabinet and it caused me to ponder the human compulsion to “collect.” Collecting may harken back to a primitive time in human history when food and tools weren’t found at WalMart, and the definition of “collecting” is usually followed by the definition of “hoarding”, but if I had to add a new sub-collection to my existing fossil hoard, it would definitely be petrified wood. 

Petrified wood is a fossil, meaning that the substance of the living material, over time, is replaced by minerals and turned to stone. The wood has to be covered by volcanic ash, mud flows, sediments in lakes, etc., for this process to take place and then, for us to be able to find it, the surrounding materials must be disturbed in some way, such as earthquakes, erosion, glaciation, etc. which exposes the now fossilized wood.

Arguably the most unique petrified wood in the world is found in the Eden Valley area of Wyoming and dates to the Eocene Epoch, about 50 million years ago. Vickie and Jim Manderfield, of the Great Western Fossil Adventure, recently traveled to Eden Valley in search of this fossil treasure.  

The photo above and below are of their finds.

There are 2 factors that make Eden Valley petrified wood so unusual. The first is that the trees grew in an area of shallow, algae filled lakes creating an environment where this particular petrification process began while the trees were either still alive or immediately after they died. The second factor is the algae itself which formed a thick coating around the wood, creating a perfect cast of the living tree. The trees eventually died, shrinking within their algae casts, leaving spaces that were slowly filled in with silica rich water solutions creating beautiful layers of white to blue-tinged chalcedony with occasional golden calcite inclusions. The wood itself has a gray to black color and retains every tiny detail of its living form.

Finding EV wood requires more work than just getting to the hunting grounds in west- central Wyoming. The target area is 80 miles wide and the wood is 12-18” under the surface of the soil. The best hunting strategy for someone with time constraints is to seek out the shallow pits of other hunters and continue their work.

While it is possible to find fossilized wood in Florida, it can also be found in many other states and the following link is to a web page that provides an excellent basic outline for the history of petrified wood in the United States: http://andy321.proboards.com/thread/ 64569/petrified-wood

Feel free to use it as a vacation planner to start your own petrified wood collection. 

More success with the saw

I finally worked up the courage to slice the only whole septarian nodule that I brought back from Utah.  These nodules are surprisingly fragile and I broke the others at the hunting site to ensure that they weren't simple mud balls.  A broken nodule, however, is not a tragedy, as the rough side can be polished to amazing effect.

The above photo is my whole nodule, loaded and ready to go.

TA DA!!!

I LOVE these things!

It's like a lithic mandala.

I'm going to have a friend polish this one for me so I can meditate on it.

Hard to believe they let us do this for free!

Even on the tightest schedule

there is room for spur-of-the-moment opportunity.

We four participants, on the Great Western Fossil Adventure, were already tired from scrambling around the Arizona desert for hours, dragging 5 gallon buckets of rocks back to the truck, and now we needed to head north several hours, through the Tusher mountain range of south-central Utah, in order to cover some of the 8 hours between us and our next destination in Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Vickie, while perusing her rockhounding guide to Utah, discovered that we were going to pass by an area where we could hunt for septarian nodules.
For free!

All we had to do was drop by a certain rock shop near Mt. Carmel, Utah and pick up the map.
The rock shop was easy to find and the proprietress was very nice but she made it clear that we needed 4WD and 4WD skills and that if the rain started up again, we needed to come back down immediately as the road was very dangerous.
What she called a "road" I would call a "mud path stuck to the side of a small mountain."
I'm not used to riding around in 4WD situations but Jim is a very skilled driver and he knew what he was doing.  We made it to the quarry and started searching.
Septarian nodules aren't fossils but their genesis involves mud sticking to organic matter, be it a small dead animal, leaf, etc., and forming, over millions of years, into an amazing conglomeration of yellow calcite crystals, dark brown lines of aragonite, and a limestone shell.  I read that sometimes it is possible to find the original fossil inside.  That would be cool!
I felt like the septarian queen.
I couldn't NOT find them.
It used to be possible to find the nodules on the ground but nowadays they must be quarried from 20-30' underground and what we were doing was scouring the spoil piles.  Most of what we found was broken open but I also found a couple of solid ones that I can't wait to put on the lapidary saw.

This was an unplanned side trip but the nodules ended up being one of my favorite finds.
I could've hunted for them all day but
#1. I was exhausted!
#2. We had to get back on the road.
#3. The dang truck was filling up!

The hardest part about leaving was getting Vickie off the rock wall.

I wish I had her energy!

Our final destination was Kemmerer, WY

for fish fossils from the Green River formation.

It was a long drive so we had to stop for some sightseeing.

Our last night camping was COLD

but Jim's mobile Bloody Mary bar kept the chill at bay.

After my gourmet meal of hot dogs and marshmallows, Pam gave me a single hand warmer which I cradled like a tiny baby all night.

It did the trick.

We also prepped some rocks for shipping as we were going straight to the post office after the fossil fish quarry.

That's a lot of bubble wrap but as the post office would later prove...

you can never use too much bubble wrap.

To be continued...

I've got a feeling...

Is it too much to ask 

to spend a day on a Florida river

and not have a vaguely menacing character pop out of the woods?

 I understand that the "menacing" part is probably mostly imagined 

but I go on high alert when, miles from the nearest road, I run into...

(the following are some of my past experiences)

Two men with crossbows and backpacks who announce they are "staying in the woods for 2 weeks."

A man and a woman with matching bleached mohawks who announce they are going to SWIM back to the road...eventually.

A shirtless young man in camo pants with a huge bowie knife at his waist and a large pit bull at his side (need I even mention that the dog is not on a lead?) who announces nothing.

If I see you once, I'm on alert.
If I see you twice, I'm outta there.

And so went my absolutely, I-really-mean-it-this-time, last day of the season on the river,
but not before I found...

A really cool rock:

I cut this open on the rock saw to find this amazing agatized center.  I have no idea what it is (it's not coral) but I ordered a used copy of Florida's Geologic Treasures (finally!) so hopefully I'll be able to ID some of these things.

A piece of fossilized coral with botryoidal formations:

More fossilized coral with the colorful outer patina of minerals from the river water:

This beauty is truly only skin deep, but that's ok with me.

A requisite horse tooth, astragalus, and hemi fragment:

This area of the river yields so little fossilized material beyond the coral that I usually bring my own "stunt fossils" from home so that I have something to show if I run into a curious canoer.

Mostly I find horse teeth and small astragali.

 And eyeglass lenses.

Weird.

And after a whole season of digging...ta da!

An honest to goodness complete meg, small with vestigial cusps (and I'm making that up).

 Exciting to find!

I made it to a fossil club meeting down in Ft. Myers

and saw this creative use of broken megs and shark teeth by one of the club members:

And I got a new name tag that expresses the joy of the hobby:

Weeee!!!

The end is nigh!

All good things must come to an end

and the Great Western Fossil Adventure was no different.

Not only were we physically worn out, we all shared a nasty head cold

 from being in the truck together for so many hours.

Time to strike camp and get to the Blue Moon Quarry in Kemmerer, WY.

We were the only people hunting fossils that day, maybe because it was a Monday.

The owner was laid back and friendly; showed us what to do then turned us loose.

He did warn us that if we found the edge of a fossil, STOP HAMMERING.  The fossils are very fragile, the slate feels like chalk, and an inexperienced hunter can wreck a good fossil with a single hammer blow.  I know this for a fact because I wrecked my 2 best fish that way. 

What was my compulsion to keep hammering?!!! Anyway...

Beautiful scenery.

Great company.

A perfect finale to a wonderful trip.

Pam found the best fossil fish.  Its tail is still hidden under the shale (STOP HAMMERING!) and she can carefully expose it at home.  The spine of the fish is filled with glittering white calcite crystals, AND she has the "negative" of the fish: the other side of the shale, which is almost as good as the "good" side.  Very impressive!

The last 4 hours kinda felt like 8.

I'm thinking the next trip I plan should involve some relaxation, too.

I took the fish fossils in my carry on luggage as they were too fragile to ship.

Here's a before of my best fish fossil:

Here's how it looks after I carefully removed some of the remaining shale:

Here's a detail of a fish fossil that is over 48 million years old:

Next year...and yes, I'm already thinking about next year...

I'll plan another fossil adventure!

Here's where I admit to my failings

I am impatient, selfish, competitive,

and have a short temper when things don't go my way.

I wanted to camp where I wanted to camp,

and that was at the petrified wood site in northern Arizona.

We 4 fossil hunters, on the Great Western Fossil Adventure, were tired of being in the car, tired of dealing with rain, worried about setting up camp in the dark, 

and each had a distinct rockhounding agenda brewing in his or her mind.

It was 6 pm, 2 hours from our campsite, when I gave in and suggested a motel.  Little did I know, there was a national Little League tournament in the area and everything was booked solid.

Lots of hope, then lots of dashed hope. Ugh!

Wisely, Vickie began pointing out potential campsites as we drove through the national forest but as the miles wound down, I was more determined than ever to see it through and 

camp where I wanted to camp.

This would be a good time for a disclaimer:  long before this trip happened, I let everyone know that I had a specific agenda, which I was happy to do on my own, but if they wanted to go with me, 

they would have to bend to my will!

The beauty of the scenery as we emerged from pine forests and began our descent to a desert valley ringed in vermillion cliffs was astounding but our joy was mixed with trepidation as part of the impressive scenery included lightening and sheets of rain in the distance.

I LOUDLY cursed my way through setting up camp.

The wind was trying to grab our tents out of our hands and it was impossible to hammer stakes into the rocky ground.  Pam patiently did what I yelled at her to do and with a little adaptation (I weighed  down the inside of each tent corner with boulders), and a little luck (the rain didn't hit until the middle of the night),  we were all safely in our sleeping bags just after nightfall.

Rest assured, I apologized to everyone for my cursing.  

Jim said he couldn't hear me over his own cursing.

Best decision of the trip!

Look at our little camp in the distance.  What a great place and so interesting!

Everywhere you look there's petrified wood from tiny splinters to trunks, whole trees laid out on the top of the hills, ravines cluttered with it.  

I suppose since it's not "rainbow wood" (the highly colorful agatized wood from around the Petrified Forest National Park) there's not a lot of interest in it, but to us, it was one of the best places on the whole trip!

I sat by this tree, on the top of a hill, for along time, trying to take it all in: the beauty of the location, the antiquity of the material, that there was once a forest of conifers in this desert location.

I love how the lichens growing on the surface make it look like it's still wood and not stone.

Depending on where you looked, the petrified wood had different characters.

The tree in the photo above was very light in color with areas of cream-colored druzy quartz crystals.

Jim discovered a single gully with the smooth, more colorful agatized wood.

I found one hillside that had wood with dark tinted druzy crystals.  It looks like bark in the photo above but that was the inside of the tree, and through mineral replacement over millions of years,

it transformed into big quartz crystals.

There were also lots of small druzy pieces on this hillside.

These look like seed pods or fossilized ears of baby corn but they are pieces of the inside of the trees.

Hard to capture their full beauty with my inferior camera.

This is the top view of some of the druzy fragments which initially led me to believe they were petrified twigs but later we spotted sections in situ, inside a whole tree.

We all agreed that at some time in the future we would return and camp for longer so that we could do more exploration but by lunch time that day, my whirlwind schedule dictated

We had to go!

To be continued...

And you probably thought I wasn't hunting fossils anymore

There's an old saying,

"When one fossil season closes, 

another one opens somewhere else."

(I just made that up)

The official close to my river season came with these 2 momentous finds:

I know what you're thinking and no, it doesn't work.

This was fun to find because this is the exact lure I fished with ALL THE TIME 

growing up in Missouri.  It's called The Killer

 and we definitely slayed a lot of bass and bluegill with them.

While my fossil friends were closing out their "river season"

with absolutely amazing finds

my "desert season" was just about to begin!

I've traveled a lot and every time I come home from a great trip I have an overwhelming need to go right back, asafp, and capture some more of those wonderful memories.

Unfortunately, it never works out that way.

Extreme financial limits only allow me 1 visit per location.  There's so many places I want to see!

My January trip to Arizona gave me the same feelings, especially to revisit the petrified wood location in the north of the state.

This time it worked out!

I was determined to go back because in January, the Utah trilobite quarry was closed (too cold!) and I really, really wanted to find some trilobites...

and maybe some fossil fish in Wyoming...

So I plotted a geographical triangle 

with Utah, Arizona, and Wyoming at each corner.

I would've gladly done it alone but fossils are more fun with friends so I was happy when Pam agreed to accompany me AND then Jim and Vickie, also from my fossil club, wanted to go, too.

I think the U-Dig fossil bucket says it all:

I'll break this trip up into a couple of posts

so I don't overload you with envy! 

Allow me to start at the beginning.

Jim and Vickie are snowbirds so on their way back to Wisconsin this spring, they dropped by my house and took my tent, sleeping bag, pillow, and rock tools with them.  That way, I didn't have to check any bags on my flights to Salt Lake City in June, where they were kind enough to pick up Pam and me at the airport.  They have a well maintained 4WD truck and enough camping gear that we never wanted for a thing the entire trip.  Jim is an experienced driver, both in 2 and 4WD so we were in good hands for our adventure.

The only catch was unloading all that gear every evening and reloading it every morning.  

The process was very organized in the beginning and a bit of a free-for-all by the end.

First (attempted) stop: Dugway, Utah, for geodes.

When Vickie and Jim said they wanted to stop and hunt geodes on our way from the airport to our first campsite, 2 hours away, I was...reluctant.  I was imagining the little geodes I bought in a Colorado gift store as a child.  Yawn...

We couldn't find the area and eventually gave up, heading southwest to Delta, Utah to set up camp in preparation for an early start digging trilobites the next morning.  Along the way, we stopped at an Ace Hardware to buy some supplies and out back was a cement pad strewn with Dugway geode halves, collected and cut by a local.

I had no idea that these things would be the size of cantaloupes...or larger! 

and packed full of stunning druzy quartz crystals.

And they were $5 each!

Shut the front door!!!  I bought 4! 

Pam and Vickie stocked up, too, so we hadn't even been in the state one day and we'd already added 50 lbs of rocks to the truck.

The U-Dig trilobite quarry is listed as being in Delta, Utah

but it's actually an hour away from Delta, not including the 20 mile unpaved road.

Since the area is BLM land, we decided to camp rough just outside of the quarry entrance.  

I found out on our first night camping that Jim is a Bloody Mary master and a delicious cocktail became our ritual for closing out each successful day.

Second stop: U-Dig Fossils,  near Delta, Utah

This quarry is located in the mid-Cambrian House Range in western Utah and splitting layers of limestone shale can reveal trilobites: 

A trilobite is a form of invertebrate marine life that lived more than 550 million years ago, but is now extinct. These hard-shelled prehistoric critters roamed the sea floor and coral reefs in search of food. Because of their great diversity and often perfect preservation in fine-grained rock, they are one of the most popular fossils among collectors. (from the U-Dig Fossil website)

Vickie found the best of the bunch.

I was happy with my finds, too.

I did become overly possessive of the pry bar...

but I think I had been influenced by a recent episode of "Naked and Afraid"

where the contestants fought about who would get to use the knife.

After 4 solid hours of splitting rocks, we packed all our "bugs" and hit the road for a long haul to our next camp in northern Arizona.

To be continued...