I haven't posted anything on fossils since November. There were several good reasons for this; I hadn't been doing much fossil fossicking; my old digital camera was broken, my blog was malfing, and all that holiday cheer raining down like sleet kept yours truly in the bunker most of the time. However, my darling wife gave me a new dcam for xmas, and said dcam has a macro setting, for close up images.
I have a garage full of fossil bearing native NE Oklahoma sandstone, limestone, and shale. With my new dcam, I can go wild. Consider the above image the first of a series. It is an anomaly in my collection. First of all, it is a vertebrate fossil, a bony fish. All the fossils I have as yet found in the Tulsa area are either marine invertebrates or plant fossils of the Carboniferous Period. I think this particular fish is far, far younger than that. It looks rather like a trout, doesn't it? I did find this fossil, but I have no idea where it comes from. Someone did a fair amount of work to clear the surrounding matrix rock from the fossil image. You may not believe it, but I found this fossil fish in an alley in Denver, Colorado, near to the east end of City Park. I was a great alley walker back in the good old bad old days before lithium entered my life, and Denver has great alleys. I wasn't a canner or shopping cart pusher but I considered myself an urban hunter gatherer, and if I found something interesting or useful I would bring it home. You just can't believe what people will throw away—we truly are the most wasteful society on Earth. In Denver, when people had yard or garage sales, often everything they couldn't sell or give away went in the alley at the end of the day. I found my fossil fish in just such a pile of what I suspect were yard sale discards. Why would someone throw something like that away?
Next: The Brachiopods of Tall Chief Cove.
