The past couple of days here have been miserable. Snow on and off all day yesterday, the value of today's highest wind gust (41) exceeded the value of the day's high temperature (35). Though I would have rather been out chasing birds on these final 2 days of my "break in service", I spent them playing Junior Invertebrate Paleontologist, instead. Yesterday I gently cleaned everything up then, today, got them all identified. I thought I would share some of the incredible detail on a few of them, too.

This first example is a straight ammonite named Sciponoceras gracile; straight ammonites are members of a family known as Baculites. Extinct, Baculites ranged from 7 cm (2.75 in.) to 2 m (6.5 ft.) in length, but the fossils are extremely fragile and rarely found intact. This fragment is 2.5 cm (1 in.) long, 1 cm. (0.4 in.) in diameter and is interesting because of the markings. The lines that you see are called sutures and divided the shell into chambers. Similar in some respects to the ballast tanks on submarines (I'm no expert by any means, but it is an easy way for me to explain this - even if not the correct scientific description), these animals could add/remove water from the chambers and thereby control their depth in the water column. Like all the other ammonites, Sciponoceras disappears from the fossil record 65 million years ago.

Perissoptera prolabiata, while extinct, is a member of a gastropod (snails and slugs) superfamily that includes modern conchs. Missing from this fossil is a "wing-like" extension that protrudes from one side. The attraction, of course, is the incredible detail that remains in the fossilized shell. Of the 3 I collected, this one exhibits much more of the shell detail and 1 still has the wing-like appendage (though little of the shell texture remains). Length is about 2.5 cm. (1 in.) and diameter (at the widest point) is 1.3 cm. (0.51 in.).

Another gastropod, Turritella whitei, was first described in 1893 by T.W. Stanton from the Tropic Shale. The fine detail in the coils around the shell are what makes this such a cool find (my last entry featured another one). Turritella species first appear in the fossil record in the Cretaceous and there are modern examples living today. This fossil is 3.5 cm. (1.375 in.) long.

Last we'll take a close look at a Pycnodonte newberryi. As noted in the last entry, these were all over the place at many of the limestone concretions. This one, at 2.5 x 2.0 cm. (1.0 x 0.79 in.), is not the largest I collected, but does feature a hole not found in the others. About 90 million years ago this oyster became a meal for a Gastropod that bored the hole then ate the tissue inside (then kindly left it for me to collect!).