It rained for days, non-stop, before the October field trip. The hopes for a successful field trip looked grim. Only 8 people, including myself, showed up at Hueston Woods, our original destination. The rains had stopped and by 11 am, the sky completely cleared, making it a beautiful, blue sky autumn day. But we were not getting off that easy. Days of rain had caused the creek there to overflow it's banks, flooding the road leading to the fossil site. The staff at the campground there also warned us that the fossil site is probably under water.
So we developed a plan "B". A good Ricmondian Formation site was only a few miles away and we had been there for a field trip before (Sept 1999). So we took a caravan of 4 cars to the site to see if it was still as good as it had been 7 years earlier.
Here we are on the caravan to the first road cut. It was a pretty view and
it didn't seem to take long to find the cut we remembered back in 1999. And it was just as good. We found tons of horn coral and a
big variety of other fossils. It was an exposure of the Whitewater Formation. The air warmed up and it was very comfortable on
the sunny road cut. We also developed an optional second site, a long road cut
we had passed on the way up. That one was just as good too.
The road cut was not very steep or tall. But it was thick with rubbly
Richmondian material from the Whitewater formation. The formation was easy to
identify by the abundance of Horn Coral and the encrusting coral, Protaeara
richmondensis.
Regardless of the abundance of the large, common fossils on the site, the
best way to find unusual or rare fossils is to sit down, get close to the ground
and carefully examine the ground for the countless rare items that can be found
in the Richmondian.
The edge of this road cut was steep and dangerous. Our thoughts, though,
were "what different kinds of fossils are down there?"
Next Page: Fossils Found That Day
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Page 1: What Happened and Fossil
Collecting
Page 2: Fossils Found Part 1
Page 3: Fossils Found Part 2
Page 4: Fossils Found Part 3
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