Wednesday, June 01, 2005

The above is a depiction of the Earth during "Tulsa Time," the period when the fossiliferous sedimentary rocks of Tulsa County were formed. Tulsa was south of the equator at the time.  The pin in the map would go somewhere between the arrows marking the "Ancestral Rockies" and "Ouachita Mts." I drove out to the Hwy 75 site on Saturday. I'm afraid I have no pictures because my digital camera has died. Someone was already working at the rock face where the mini-lagerstatten of grey shale is exposed at the moment, until the killdozers and shovelsauruses of the Hwy. Dept. shift the rock around some more. I stopped to chat; the guy turned out to be a petroleum geologist from Louisiana, on a busman's holiday, hunting for fossils. We traded tips,talked tools and technique, and so on. He quzzed me on my knowledge of geology, paleontology, and fossils; whether he was trying to find out whether I was a complete idiot, or perhaps some crazy creationist from Oral Roberts University, I don't know. I learned some new things. 4:23:10 AM    comment []

NAME THIS FOSSIL I found the above at a road cut through a big cuesta (a hill that has a steep incline or cliff on one one side, and a long gradual slope on the other, caused by tilting of rock strata) on the Turner Turnpike (I-44) between Sapulpa and Bristow, Oklahoma. I've never seen anything like it before, and haven't been able to match it to any depiction or description in my reference books. I don't know the age of the rock at the site, I don't know whether this is a trace fossil or a fossil of the organism itself. Here is an image of the "assemblage" I collected along with it: Turner Turnpike fossil assemblage I picked these out of the detritus of the heavily eroded sandstone bank of the road cut. There along with the mystery fragments which look like nothing so much as pieces of a broken phonograph record, there were marine fossils; bits of crinoid stems, brachiopods, and a couple of gastropods:   Note that all the images of individual fossils are enlarged. The biggest piece was a bit under two inches long. Anybody know what the "broken record" fragments are? The Flintstone Hypothesis will not be accepted. 3:15:16 AM    comment []