Back Yard Fossils

The previous owners of our place used slate slabs for hardscaping in several places about the yard. And we've found quite a bit of left over slabs which we've used for hardscaping as well.

Recently I was gathering some for another project when  I noticed what looked to be imprints of ancient life.

Fossils?

That would be pretty cool.

Especially to find them just lying around in a pile in the yard.

To bastardize a Yogi-ism, you can find a lot by just looking. What's in your yard?

I Got A New Camera!

Well, not really. But I did buy a book (don't tell Patty!).

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Here is an image of a lichen from our yard that I made with the 'new' camera. The curious shadows are a clue to the type of camera I used.

Here's another lichen from the yard. We've had some windy days of late and it seems these were blown out of the trees.

Here's a crop of the second image (that's a grain of sand in the lower left). One very cool feature of this new camera is the high resolution files it creates. The files sizes of the TIFFs out of the camera for the two full lichen shots were 284 MB and 189 MB respectively.

Here is another pair of images, this time of a fossil plant (which I found on one of the first adventures Patty and I had together).

Here is the full image.

And here is the crop. Note the detail in the stem and leaves.

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The book is Picturing Science and Engineering by Felice C. Frankel.

The camera is an Epson Perfection 3200 Photo scanner. A flatbed scanner that I've had since the MacOS 9 days, at least ten years. So, not such a 'new' camera at all.

The first chapter is entitled, "Flatbed Scanner" and was the inspiration for this post. I can see lots of uses for this old camera.

This is gonna be fun.

Weekend Wanderings ... Poricy Park Fossil Beds

The weekend's wander found me going solo, as I'm still at my parent's place. I had thought about visiting Sandy Hook, to do a bit of winter birding, but it was 21° F when I woke this morning, and I didn't have the proper attire with me.

So I chose a park local to my mom and dad's, Poricy Park. Specifically, I went to the Fossil Beds section of the park.

Off down the trail went I.

Which follows a stream that carves into the banks.

Which reveals the fossils.

The cliff side is unstable, and digging could bring it down on top of you. Thus the warning.

As this close up shows, most of the cliff face is ice mixed with dirt. There were mini landslides throughout my time there. Rain water soaks into the soil and upon freezing pushes a layer of dirt up. The subsequent melting sends it tumbling down.

The resulting erosion leaves the trees in a precarious position, although they seem to be adapting to the situation. And it exposes the fossils, which likewise tumble down into the stream.

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Dinosaurs first come to mind when one thinks fossils, but this area was underwater. So here one finds shells.

Well, mostly shell fragments.

They were all about on edge of the stream.

As with the cliff face, the ground was frozen as well. And fossils like the one above were inaccessible, frozen in place.

And while I found plenty of shells, I hoped to find a shark's tooth. But it was not to be.

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The fossil area was at the start fo the trail, and it wasn't clear that there was much of a trail after.

Did I mention it was cold? They icicles were an obvious sign, but the streams which crisscrossed the area had a cap of ice. 

Some of which was colorful. Due to decaying vegetation methinks, mostly leaves.

But being in a valley kept the wind down, so it was actually a pleasant saunter through the flood plain.

There were signs everywhere that the area had been recently flooded. Vegetation all flattened in the same direction.

Many toppled trees.

And debris washed about.

As you can see, the area was also almost completely devoid of greenery. I think this might be skunk cabbage.

One expected culprit. But I wonder if the flooding has a impact as well.

As with last week's wander, I eventually came to a spot that where I could not continue. And it was back to the car for me.

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As with many natural areas this one was preserved through the actions of concerned citizens. Thanks to them, I enjoyed a pleasant Saturday morning. It was relaxing and helped reduce the stress of dealing with dad's injury.

Bald Eagle State Park

It was 70° F this past Friday as we headed out for a nice spring weekend getaway in central Pennsylvania. The "PA Wilds" area as they like to call it, in north central Pennsylvania. We stayed at the very nice Nature Inn at Bald Eagle State Park. Five of us, myself and four women, for a weekend of kayaking, hiking, and enjoying the start of spring.

But nature had other plans.

That's our friend Marie's car with both the kayak and they snow on it. (My new ride is in the background.) We didn't get much snow but it was enough to reinforce the idea that it was still winter in this neck of the woods.

We did a bit of hiking. And we took a tour of a local distillery, sampling their wares, to keep warm of course.

And we went fossiling. Saturday morning the park had a program on finding fossils that we took part in. And we found fossils. Marie in particular had a good eye for the small shells that made up the majority of what we found. But we all found stuff.

Here we are off to search for ancient treasures. That's Pat and Eleni in front with Marie a bit behind (Patty was in the room taking a nap!). We were headed down to the lake. The lake is a flood control lake maintained by the Army Corp of Engineers. The water level is lowered each spring in anticipation of snow melt, but as there was little snow this year the lake shore was extended, exposing all manner of things, including fossils.

In fact, when we asked about the fossiling possibilities at the park, Cody, the fellow who checked us in when we first arrived, told us we could find old fishing gear that had been dropped into the lake, bicycles (!), and even shoes and boots, including baby shoes. He assured us that the bodies would not be attached said footwear.

And sure enough one of the first things Pat found was a child's sneaker. She was quite proud of this find, as can be seen in the image below.

Image Courtesy Marie Raupp

But all of those rocks at her feet, and up and down the lake shore, held real fossils. We just had to find them. Here are some I found.

This is a typical find, with brachiopods (shell like items) and crinoids (tube like items).

Another brachiopod.

We also found corals, some of which are shown in the following two images.

The park employee who led the expedition, alas I've forgotten his name, called fossils "snapshots of an ancient world". So the image below would thus be a snapshot of the sea floor 500 million or so years ago.

All these fossils are from the Devonian period, long before dinosaurs roamed the earth. To me, the prize fossil from this period would be a trilobite, which can be and have been found at the park. But they are rare finds. But I looked and looked. And I found several intriguing fossils. Including ...

Perhaps a trilobite head?

A tail, surrounded by brachiopods?

An imprint of the body?

Tantalizing yet ultimately unsatisfying finds. I'll just have to keep searching.

Other finds included this odd item. Here is the "top" view:

And now the "bottom":

  More coral.

And these two, which I'm not sure of what they are.

Most of these were sizable chucks of stone, too heavy in aggregate to carry back to the lodge. And as this site is a state park one isn't supposed to collect fossils anyway. So what I have are these images. The fossils are still on the lake shore. Waiting for others, (perhaps you?), to find them.

Good luck. And I hope you find a trilobite!

Ancient Plant Geekery

For Christmas I got a bag of rocks. But not just any rocks, these were special rocks. From the Florissant  Fossil Quarry in Colorado.

And these rocks were guaranteed to have fossils in them.

And they did!

Like this leaf.

This tiny leaf.

Most of the fossils were tiny, the largest being this leaf.

All of the identifiable fossils we found were of plants. Mostly leaves like this fragment showing leaf structure.

Or this almost complete leaf.

Are these grass leaves? Or are they stems?

But there were others like this one that weren't just leaves.

And its mirror image.

The rocks were a very crumbly type of paper shale with thin layers that we split to unveil the fossils within. Thus the mirror images.

Here I am working on exposing the "big leaf" shown above.

Image courtesy Patty Rehn

I've got an X-Acto knife that I used to pry the shale apart and to scrape away rock matrix to expose the detail. But it wasn't all that easy, and at the lower right of the above image is a thicker chunk of rock we used a hammer and chisel on.

One of the coolest fossils was this one.

It appears to be the reproductive parts of a flower, the stamens, pistil, and ovary. It is very tiny.

I first learned of the Florissant Fossil Quarry in Kirk Johnson and Ray Troll's excellent book, Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway, and museum exhibit of the same name, which I got to see when it visited the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia. Johnson is a paleontologist, whose specialty is ancient plant life, and Troll is an artist.

The Quarry is a comercial operation where anyone can go and try their luck at fossil hunting. It is not be be confused with the nearby Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, home to petrified sequoia trees.

I forget why, but I had shared the book with Patty. And we had added the Quarry to our list of places to visit. This was in September. I had put the book back on the shelf. It seems Patty pulled it back off and used it to find the contact info for the Quarry. The folks there were happy to send out the rocks that made for one very cool Christmas gift.

The complete set of fossil images, with and without the dime for scale, can be found in my SmugMug gallery.