Hey, I resemble that comment!

I'm read a book about the founder of the science of geology, William Smith, entitled

The Map That Changed The World by Simon Winchester,
and in it I found this quote:

"What had hitherto been a signifier of drawing-room decorum seemed overnight to become the pastime of the dull, and then steadily to evolve into that which amateur paleontology is now: no more than the mark of the nerd."
Why I oughta...!
So what if I like to sit in a ditch on Sundays.  I still made it to the sports bar in time to watch my New England Patriots beat the Buffalo Bills and no one was the wiser.
But what about that ditch?

I like hanging out in this ditch because it exposes a layer of fossil coral.  I used to be nervous down here alone but I believe there are far less miserable places for serial killers to hang out.

You can clearly see the strata here:

There is an upper layer of solid grainy, dark soil and then a layer of tightly compressed coral sitting on top of a base layer of hard gray clay.  Initially, I tried to just pull out pieces of coral.  Nope!

Then I came back with a small shovel, but the layers were tight enough that the end of the shovel folded back on itself.  Now I bring a small hammer and narrow chisel and sit on the mud in meditative silence while I work out a few pieces to take home and slab for jewelry.

Knee-high boots and lots of insect repellant are indispensable but

what a beautiful reward for the trouble!

Here's another piece of fossil art

put together by one of the members of the Fossil Club of Lee County:

Very creative and she's definitely not a nerd!  :-)

Glad to Have Junk in the Trunk

I had 2 consecutive days of fossil hunting planned

during my group trip to Washington

but circumstances were trying to throw a monkey wrench into the mix.

My non-fossil friend from the previous day's adventure was supposed to head up to Canada with the rest of the group but a lost passport meant she would either have to spend the day alone or AGAIN go fossil hunting with me.  I offered to rent my own car for one day (that's how determined I was to go rock hounding) but she reassured me that if she wore her grungy clothes and had some of her own tools, she would be perfectly happy to hammer rocks with me.  

I stopped at a convenience store and found a cheap hammer and flat blade screwdriver: 

good enough to split shale.  

That day's fossil destination had been picked out of a rock hounding guide for the state of Washington.  It's always a gamble, since many of the books were written years ago, and you never know if there will be an apartment complex built over your fossil site when you get there but I still wanted Washington state fossilized palm fronds and this seemed like a reasonably 

easy-to-get-to destination with a high possibility of success.

My rental car on this trip was a Nissan Versa and I drove it for about an hour on good roads 

until the map said to take a left.

The "road" to the left was only wide enough for one vehicle and began twisting up the side of a mountain.  It was well maintained and there were regular turnouts in case you met with an oncoming vehicle (which we did) but my passenger was not enjoying that part of the journey.  

Anxiety can catch like the common cold and soon I was white-knuckling the steering wheel and sneaking peeks at the odometer to see if we had gone the distance.

Only one...more...turn...

onto a rutted gravel road that put the previous incline to shame.

I shifted into the only choice for a lower gear, and crept upwards. 

Right about the time that the tires started spinning and my friend was ready to abandon ship,

we came upon a hillside littered with fragments of shale palm fronds.

JOY!!!

The guide book described this area as an old quarry which exposed an outcrop of Eocene age fossils (approx. 54-34 Ma) deposited in sedimentary formations when it was a low-lying coastal range with a subtropical climate. The rocks seemed to either be extremely fragile shale or very hard sandstone.  The shale had lots and lots of palm fronds but also a wide mix of broadleaf fossils, ferns, twigs, etc. and the sandstone had fossilized wood.  

It was not easy to retrieve a couple samples of the fossil wood but eventually I succeeded.

The difficulty in retrieving leaf and palm fossils lay in the fragility of the material but we eventually had a satisfactory selection.

Here's my "happy place" selfie:

Might not look like much but it measures approximately 12" x 15" x 2" and weighs 20 lbs and I got it  home WHOLE!  One side is a palm frond and the other side is a variety of leaves and twigs.

I actually brought home TWO pieces that weighed in at 20 lbs each and since it was Labor Day weekend, I wasn't able to ship them flat rate on Monday.  I had to load 2 checked bags and a carry-on duffel bag with carefully packaged shale fossils and 

jettison most of my other belongings in order to make weight.

I mean, I couldn't leave any of this behind!

(oh, and there were more on the floorboards and the seats)

Once again, we celebrated with a fabulous meal and a Washington micro-brew.

Back at home, safe and sound with my "new" fossils, I find it easy to get lost in their beauty; layers and layers of forest growth compressed into these perfect remnants.  Each stone is like a book with wonderful illustrations inside that will be forever unseen and only imagined.

Living proof!

I'm living proof that you can

pick an unreasonable goal and succeed!

The Washington state women's kayak trip that's been in the planning stages for over a year finally happened (no, that's not the unreasonable goal), and since I've decided to multi-task on my trips, I wasn't going to let 6 days in the Pacific Northwest pass me by without at least one fossil expedition.

Here I am, in the San Juan Islands, in the driver's seat of a 22' tandem kayak.

I skipped the selfie after I finished paddling 25 miles coz I wasn't smiling anymore.

The problem with combining activities

when you are also navigating the vacation schedules of 7 other people is that

something has to give.

I regret that I missed out on some of the group activities to Vancouver (bicycles and wineries: need I say more?) but I'm also thrilled with the fossils I found and wouldn't trade them for anything,

which brings me back to my opening statement.

I now know, after a few tries, that if I write to fossil and mineral clubs in the areas I will be visiting and ask for info to an easy site where I can find even one little fossil to take home,

I will receive a letter of acknowledgement and then never hear back again.

These trips are time sensitive material!

(The notable exception is the wonderful person in MN that gave me detailed directions to the staurolite crystal area.)

I'm not asking for state secrets or a free pass to anyone's private honey hole; I just want a fossil...

any fossil.

To put it in perspective for us Florida fossil hunters, how many times have you directed people to Venice Beach for some basic shark teeth? A lot, right?  And I've even sent satellite pics to people to explain how to get to Apollo Beach.  All I'm saying is...

Share the love!

So I got one useful reply from all my queries and it was from a member of the fossil forum who directed me to an area where he used to look for palm frond fossils, albeit 30 years ago.

Good enough for me.

I loaded up my tools.

(when in Washington, right?)

But I also loaded up one of my friends who is not a fossil hunter.  She thought it would be interesting and I didn't put anymore thought into it.  We drove about 30 minutes to the town of Bellingham and then watched the odometer to take us 11 miles to the target area.

Hmmm...a narrow, winding road with a steep foliage-clogged incline on one side and a steep scary drop-off on the other.  I found a turnout, parked, and started bushwacking and climbing.

And that was the problem.

I didn't think to advise my friend to dress in old clothes OR to bring something else to do, and I didn't even have any tools for her to use.  I was happily splitting rocks, hoping to find a fossil while she was sitting and staring at this view:

It's an amazing view

 but there are no walking paths and after 2 hours of just sitting there, she was done, and of course, I was just getting started!  Hopefully I can go back some time.

Here's what I found once I figured out what kind of rocks to look for...

Positive and negative of a large leaf inside a small rock.

Fir needles!  So cool!

I believe this is a type of evergreen.  Small and delicate.

And then there was the perfect leaf

that I found inside a piece of very hard rock and against all better judgement and experience, 

I tried to take some of the surrounding rock off with my hammer, to make the piece easier to transport.  I broke it.

I promise, I have learned my lesson!!!

(Fool me once, yada yada yada...)

I packed my fabulous finds in a collection bag, skidded back down the slope to where my friend waited, and celebrated in town with clam chowder and a fabulous Washington micro-brew.

Stay tuned for part 2 of Living Proof!

Girls Gone Wild

Let me start by saying

I don't buy rocks.

If I didn't find it or it wasn't a gift, it doesn't have that special meaning for me.

However...

...look what trouble we girls can get into when we have a little mad money

 burning a hole in our pocket. 

M-F'ing BIG Ammonites!
Last night was our annual buy-sell-trade meeting at the Fossil Club of Lee County and I was eyeing the 2 big ammonites that had been collected by one of our club members while he was working on his ammonite-themed doctorate.  He wanted $50 apiece and I kept thinking,
"Dang!  That sounds like a good price for a BIG ammonite
with a solid provenance!"
Then Pam started eyeing the one I was eyeing and I got all competitive and, well...
You're looking at 2 new proud ammonite owners.
For those of you keeping score, the ammonites are Eopachydiscus Marcianus of the early Cretaceous, found in the Duck Creek Formation in Grayson County, Texas,
and you can take that to the bank!

It's been a month of shenanigans for us crazy ladies.

We were gifted tickets to see the cast of T. Rex Sue's skeleton 

at the Florida Museum of Natural History and we took advantage of the opportunity.

I would like to clear the air at this point by saying that I am fully aware that I am wearing the exact same top, jewelry, hairdo, blah blah blah in both photos. Crud...

I did bathe and run a load of laundry in between, if that helps.

Anyhoo...

Overwhelming to sit and think about this huge T. Rex.

While I don't exactly wish we had inhabited the same time frames,

I do, none the less, feel a wistful sense of sadness that these creatures are so unimaginably distant in our planet's past that we can never truly know what they were like, what their world was like.

Continued advancements in scientific knowledge have shed light on fascinating aspects of this animals pathology and it's very interesting reading if you Google T. Rex Sue.

Pam had some fun with a selfie.

A representation of what life might have been like if we did inhabit the same time frames.

So...no digging lately, 

as the river levels are too high and likely to remain that way until November.  I have a trip planned to the Pacific northwest and while I have very little time to rockhound while I'm there, I'm still hoping for a palm frond or two.  Gotta be better than Minnesota, right?

Apropos of nothing,

I often fantasize about owning this fossilized pine cone.

Let me rephrase that.

I fantasize about being able to go to Argentina and find my own dang pine cone!

And then there was Minnesota...

To paraphrase my usual favorite Chappelle Show quote:

"There's nothing I can say about Minnesota that hasn't already been said about Afghanistan."

Yeah, I know:  OUCH!

  But honestly, it's neither a rock hounder's nor fossil hunter's paradise.

I think it had its time in the sun but the usual human foibles of litigation and property destruction have reduced its appeal to nil.

If you want to hunt the famous, well-advertised Minnesota agates, here's what you'll see:

I researched my options on line before my trip

and was taken in by what I'll lightly call

!!!The Moose Lake Agate Scam!!!

It's hard to Google "Minnesota agate" and not be assailed by references to Moose Lake's amazing agates and the Agate Days festival.  I couldn't make the festival but for $3, I was given an agate hunting permit which gave me access to 3 gravel pits.  No worries about the three T's of Trespassing, Ticketing, and Towing, and no wonder.  Two of the "gravel pits" were sandy ATV pits where it would be very unsafe to wander around (lots of blind hills with ATV's potentially flying over the top) and very unproductive since there wasn't much in the way of viable rock.  The third pit was the...best...and that's not saying much since it's been picked over to within an inch of its existence. 

Here's a selfie of me in cold, blustery rain, accepting the fact that I was going to have to hunt for micro-agates.

The absolute best agate of the trip:

Fabulous, the size of a Texas pea, and hard-put to justify all the effort.

Here's a few other fragments I found that reminded me of a handful of molars:

Moose Lake, if you can't at least offer tourists a fresh pile of gravel every so often, 

it might be time to switch up your advertising.

I was glad to trade Moose for Beaver

(take that however you will)

and headed up the North Shore region of Lake Superior to Beaver Bay.

A helpful member of a Minnesota mineral club had referred me to the Beaver Bay Agate Shop and she did not lead me astray.  I chatted with the owner, Keith Bartel, and his son, Jeremiah, and these guys are the real deal: friendly, helpful, and lovers of the hobby.  They directed me to a beautiful rock beach almost across from their shop where I blissfully sifted through stones for a few hours.

I was able to load up on micro agates.

Can't wait for a cozy winter eve to get out my scanning electron microscope

 and enjoy my collection.

My favorite find was a piece of trash:

This is just a blob of aluminum, churned by Lake Superior into a funky little treasure.

The North Shore had a better feel for me overall.  

Minnesota is not known for fossils.

There are some hunting areas in Minneapolis and one of the state parks offers a fossil hunting tour every Saturday but that didn't fit into my schedule and the potential fossils listed were small shark teeth and clam shells.  I was interested in stromatolites, fossilized blue-green algae, but couldn't come across any specific sites.

Out of all my pre-trip letter writing, I only had one helpful reply. The same person that sent me to the Beaver Bay Agate Shop also suggested I dig for staurolite crystals in Royalton, MN.

 Just below a small dam on the Mississippi River is one of the only places in the United States where it's possible to find staurolite crystals that have weathered out of schist.

While the ground is littered with single crystals, the goal is crystals that have twinned into a 90º angle.  Another newbie who had found one perfect example of the cross-shaped crystal told me to dig in the grey clay and sift if as if I were panning for gold.  Two hours later, I resorted to surface hunting and found some decent little examples.  Well worth the excursion...

...but not the whole trip.

On to greener, or rather, rockier pastures!

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...