Photos and words by Bill Heimbrock
For April 2015, we visited an old site that has been fossil hunted by the Dry Dredgers for decades. It exposes the Southgate member of the Kope formation in Northern Kentucky.
It was not raining when we arrived at the site at 10 AM. It was pretty overcast though. Rain drops began around 10:30 AM and got a bit steadier throughout the morning. This didn’t stop the Dry Dredgers. About a dozen people attended fully prepared to ignore the rain and collect Cincinnatian Kope formation fossils. Only a few people showed up at first, but others arrived fashionably late. Some great fossils were found that day and people seemed happy with their take-homes.
Here are just a few pictures of our wet fossil collecting.
There were tiny but easy-to-find fossils everywhere on this site. In the picture
below, a glance at the ground revealed crinoid stems and trilobite parts. Click
on the picture below to find the small, hard-to-see fossils.
Fossils Found That Day
Crinoids
Probably the best find of the day was this slab of crinoids found by J.S. Only
two calyxes (crinoid crowns) were visible on the surface of the rock on the
site. It was pretty muddy. But after he got it home and washed it up, he found
two more crinoids on it. The next 3 pictures are of the slab while it was onsite
and fresh from the clay.
Other people found crinoid calyxes free from the matrix. This usually happens
when you are looking in the soft clay or "butter shale" layers. Here are four of
these calyxes, the first three are pictured with the both sides. All of these
are identified as
Ectenocrinus simplex.
Stems without crowns were everywhere. Some rocks were solid compactions of
crinoid columnals such as this next photo.
Other rocks had lots of articulated stems grouped together in what we call "log
jams."
You could also find long, individual stems that kind of make you sad when you
find them because the calyx could have been on one end, but was not. :-(
Trilobites
A wide variety of trilobites can be found on this Kope site. No whole trilobites were found. But pieces of five different kinds of trilobites were found.
The sturdy pygidium
or back end o the Flexi was abundant within the fossil hash on the surface of
rocks. (next 3 pics)
At least one thorax of a Flexicalymene sp. was found
on imbedded in a rock.
Lots and lots of these rocks were loaded with trilobite pieces. Can you spot the
Flexicalymene
pygidium in
the next two pictures? Can you pick out the additional Isotelus fragments on
those same rocks? See - now you are fossil hunting!
We were also finding huge quantities of "lace collars" from the trilobite
Cryptolithus bellulus. The second photo is a close-up of one fragment from the
first photo showing the lace collar of the trilobite..
At least one complete hypostome of often large trilobite Isotelus sp. was found
and shown below. In this case, it was a small trilobite. Note the US dime to the
left of it.
On a much smaller scale, there are two tiny and spiny trilobites abundantly
found on the surface of these rocks. Here's the "free cheek" of what is either a
Meadowtownella sp. or an Acidaspis sp.
Here's a glabella (head) of what I think is a Meadowtownella sp.
tiny spiny trilobite.
The tracks of all of these trilobites are found on the surface of the shale.
These next 2 pics are the tracks of the trilobite
Isotelus sp..
Here is what could be another track of the trilobite Isotelus sp.
but could be something else. I wish it were a larger piece of shale to see where
this track goes!
Nautiloid Cephalopods
The wet conditions that day made all the fossils stand out in brown calcite
contrasting the grey shale. This was particularly true for the straight-shelled
nautiloid cephalopods we found (next 4 pics).
Gastropods
Snails also stood out in brown against the gray shale (next 2 pics). This next
picture is of a snail (probably Sinuites sp.) with something attached to it, perhaps an inarticulate brachiopod.
On the surface of rocks and loose in the shale, we found another type of
gastropod - a high spired variety Hormotoma gracilis.
There was a good mollusk layer where the rocks were loaded with snails, clams,
monoplacophorans and nautiloids. 
In the above photo, there are both snails and clams. Upon closer examination,
you can see the diagnostic hinge teeth that tells us this is the clam
Lyrodesma sp..
Trace Fossils
Where ever we found shale, we found ichnofossils.
Brachiopods
There were two abundant brachiopod types on this site. One is
Cincinnetina multisecta
(not pictured) and the other
Sowerbyella rugosa. Both sides of one Sowerbyella
is pictured below.
Bryozoans
As is true at all Cincinnatian fossil sites, the bryozoans outnumbered all the
other fossils.
One tiny fossil we found by examining the surface of rocks with a loup is the
worm tubes of
Cornulites sp.
Even closer examination with a lens revealed
Ostracodes, a type of
crustacean.
On smooth shale surfaces you can find black markings. These are classified as
graptolites.
That's all for this trip. And you didn't even have to get soaked to enjoy seeing what we found!
Now let's see our (dry) May field trip to a new site in southern Indiana.
Previous Trips to This Northern Kentucky Kope Site
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