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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Recognizable crystals also filled in many of these burrows, as
in the nodule shown below.
The filled in material above runs all the way through the
nodule, shown below in a different view.
Many of the burrows of Ordovician soft-bodied animals were not
filled in at all. (below)
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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