Dry Dredgers Field Trip
To a Northern Kentucky Road Cut
Southgate Member, Kope Formation
October 23, 2004

Pages 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Page 4: Burrows

There is so much fossil material on the surface of the rocks on this site, that a hand lens or loup makes a big difference in seeing good fossils. On the lighter side, the hand lens causes you to stumble onto fossil-like objects. The Dry Dredgers found this "crinoid stem" (below), beautiful and intricate. 
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But a living millipede can look just like some of these fossils. Shown below, a fossil hunter noticed that the millipede blends right in, next to a pyritized burrow from the Ordovician period.
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Pyritized burrows were everywhere. This is where iron water fills the holes in shale left by worms and 450 million years of erosion. The result is interesting and beautiful trace fossils made of Pyrite, that shines in the sunlight. 
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There were also many holes in the shale filled in with phosphates and calcite. They fill in the places left by soft bodied animals and make some interesting shapes and give us some strange fossil forms, like the ones shown below.
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The burrow fill-in on the nodule below is particularly interesting. It forms a distinct shape that reminds you of a rare fossil animal, like a carpoid or an aglaspid. It's anyone's guess what it really was.
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Recognizable crystals also filled in many of these burrows, as in the nodule shown below.
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The filled in material above runs all the way through the nodule, shown below in a different view.
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Many of the burrows of Ordovician soft-bodied animals were not filled in at all. (below)
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Next Page: Graptolites Found


T A B L E   OF   C O N T E N T S

Page 1: Introduction (collecting pics)

Fossils Found That Day:
Page 2: Crinoids Part 1

Page 3: Crinoids Part 2

Page 4: Burrows

Page 5: Graptolites

Page 6: Trilobites

Page 7: Cephalopods

Page 8: Other Molluscs

Page 9: Brachiopods and Bryozoans

Pics From Our Trip To This Site in 2002


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