Fossil Fever!

For spring break, we tripped over to Brownswood, TX with the HGMS paleo people to collect fossils. It was beautiful weather with fun people and buckets of fossils to boot!

On Thursday, we collected further afield in Goldthwaite and along road cuts. We were in the Cretaceous layers. We found tons of sea urchins and oysters because sea urchins feed on the slime that grows on oysters (cool, huh?). Sea urchin spines and gastropods were avialable as well.

On Friday, Nate was totally exhausted, so Ben and I joined the crew for a trip to Wilson's Clay pit which is in the Pennsylvanian era. We found crinoid stems and calyx pieces and gastropods by the bagful. This area also held nodules of flint, so the native americans would come and collect crinoid stems for necklaces and chip flint for tools. I found a broken skinning flint and another flint that was for crushing bones to get marrow. We then made a few other stops for urchin spines, cephlaopods, and huge horn coral.

That night we had supper at our trip leader's home and Tully (the local banker) came and showed us all the fossils he had found in the past few years. The cephlapod in the picture was one of his finds!

On Saturday, Nate joined us again as we returned to the clay pit and then drove over to the spillway to get fern and crinoid stars. Then we drove back to Houston so we could celebrate Easter at home.