Older than your parents...

Don't take offense, Mom and Dad. When I explain to small children how old fossils are, I often tell them that its older than their parents. Because to a four year old, their parents seem pretty old. "So no dear, your Mommy didn't see the dinosaurs!" Well, this site is older than your parents, your grandparents, and the oldest relative you can remember. It's older than the mammoths, the dinosaurs, and any vertebrate.

However, I'm still interested. Just take a look at these! The site they from is in North Carolina and dates back to the Ediacaran, so roughly 542 million years ago. Fossil club has started taking people to the Jacob's Creek Quarry, with the permission of the owner, to collect. 

The main fossil found at the site is called Aspidella. They form small, disc shaped fossils that aren't actually the organism. They represent the hold fasts, that is, where they attached to the bottom of the sea at the time to avoid being washed away by the currents.
Some of them just appear to be indents in the rocks, while others have oxidation giving them some color, and others are preserved in the remains of the microbial mats at the time. In my opinion, these are particularly beautiful. The ones without it are interesting, but the extra color, aesthetically at least, is more appealing to me and helps tell a little more of the ancient story.

In addition, you can also find skid marks and mineralization that looks remarkably like small ferns. They aren't, by any means, but they are interesting. 

Now, the interesting thing about this site is what it lacks; there are no signs of bioturbation, indicating not what was there but what wasn't. At this point, there wasn't anything around to burrow or kick up soil and prevent it from forming layers. The only that prevents the rocks from splitting easy is the fact that, unlike most fossil sites, the rock here has seen so much time, pressure, and heat, metamorphisizing it. Normally fossils don't easily survive these conditions, but there just isn't much to this type of fossil that isn't already flat and squished.

As I mentioned before, a lot of the fossils are pretty visually appealing.  Like this one! The only problem is that they don't often take up entire slabs of slate, and slate is heavy.

Like this one. Isn't it pretty? But here's the problem; its not only on a slab, its on this rock.

See the boulder? It was bigger than I was. And deep and thick. There was no carrying that, I'm all of 130 and 5 foot 6, and even with multiple people there's just no way to bring this out or anywhere to keep it.

So this poses an interesting question.... how does one get a heavy, bulky rock out of the quarry and into the a car?

The answer: very, very carefully. With a small pick and a rock hammer, and a lot of patience. And you know, clinging to a decently steep and small edge on steel-toed boots. Not particularly high, but still not easy when you're trying to focus on not breaking a pretty specimen.

Well, it was sure worth it. Some day, that's one to get mounted on the wall. 

The things I do... this one was pretty far back on the path in the quarry, too, so it was a fairly heavy piece to tote back to the car.

For another example, here is a nice, long piece that a couple of our members came across.  Pretty, right?

Well... if you look in the picture below it, you can see how long it is. 

You can also see our Fossil Club president sitting on it, waiting for one of our trip leaders to take a swing at it. The fossil is sitting on a solid piece of rock with her between it and the part she wanted to break off.


The hope was that it would break off perfectly, away from the fossil but taking off the slate with nothing on it.

Normally, things don't go as planned. But this time it worked out beautifully and she had a wonderful piece to take back with her for education and her collection.

In a past trip to this site, this was the same woman who went walking down one of the paths looking for fossils, got turned around to where she was right outside of our boundaries, and found herself in the part of the quarry that gets rented out to the military for drill practice. The small group found themselves faced with men asking them to turn around and paranoid of what they were doing.

Let's just say that our trip leaders are much more specific about the area that we're allowed to hunt in.

Just as a final picture, we came across some modern raccoon prints. They aren't fossils, and they probably weren't more than a day old, but it was amusing to find them.

So anyway, some nice, extremely old fossils for you to take a look at :) Be watching for younger ones to be posted in the coming weeks as I head out west for my summer job in Utah.