Dr. Omed: The Fossils of Tulsa County

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 06:29:41 GMT

DR. OMED'S ILLUSTRATED WALKING NEWS:

WALKING ON BURNT GROUND

On a fine sunny Sunday early in March, Annie Beagle and I returned to the area we had scouted a couple of weeks earlier (Read the post HERE.) When Anne and I reached the railroad, the fossil bearing road cuts of which being our goal, we found that the ground south of the tracks had been charred by a wild fire as far as I could see. To the north, all was normal, late winter NE Oklahoma landscape.

Here in Oklahoma, as some pilgrims and seekers may know, drought conditions have prevailed for months, and there have been many wild fires. This is why you see signs like THIS on the highways. The local land owners I suspect aren't too happy about it, but their ill wind blows the fossil fossicker some good. The ground cover has been reduced to black stubble. This exposes the rocks.

As you can see.

This fossil has a rather medusoid aspect. I have no idea what it is.

Fossil Rice Crispies.

Actually, I think I know what these are, but I cannot retrieve the name and particulars from my un-defrag-able wetware. I would describe them as super-sized cyanobacteria (algae) on steroids. Someone will hopefully correct me if I just made a fool of myself.

Fossil gumbo.

See the bits of Crinoid and other things?

The landscape is not completely dry, but this little stream is probably spring fed. On the hike back to the parking lot abutting the sewage pond, not far from where I took this picture, Annie and I flushed an armadillo. I haven't seen an armadillo in years, and that was in southern Oklahoma. I wasn't able to get a picture of it, as I had to restrain Annie, and the little sucker moved fast once it got the wind up.

Mon, 06 Feb 2006 02:58:35 GMT

This image of carboniferous flora and fauna is found in Volume 1 of COMPTON'S PICTURED ENCYCLOPEDIA, published in the 1920s. I bought the set for almost nothing at a flea market with the idea I would use the copiously illustrated illustrations as Scissor Dance fodder. I haven't gotten around to cutting them up as yet, maybe I still have a smidge of an inhibition about slicing and dicing printed books. But, I thought I would scan and post this picture. Speaking of pictures, I've been using the macro setting of my new dcam, experimenting with the lighting and so on, to discover the best way to image my collection of fossils. I haven't quite mastered thie task:

This is the rind of one of species of trees so artistically depicted above.

This too. I've spent some time trying identify these specimens of what I believe are fossil tree "bark"

but I am still unsure.

Giant tree fern? Or Giant Club Moss?

I'm going put on my dunce cap and go sit in the corner.

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 04:45:23 GMT

THE FOSSIL OF THE DAY

A brachiopod from Tall Chief limestone, perhaps a Neospirifer.

Assorted brachiopods from Tall Chief limestone.

A layer of limestone tops the red sandstone at the Tall Chief site, like a grey-white beret tilted to one side of a redhead. It emerges from the landscape at a slight angle and terminates on the slope where both layers have been worn away. Since it is on top, it is the younger rock. Limestone would indicate deeper water, I think. This limestone is much harder than the sandstone, and it is difficult, at least for an amateur like me, to extract fossils from it without damaging or destroying the embedded fossils. I mostly settle for scrabbling about, looking for fossils that have already been weathered out of the rock. Eatonia, Rhynchotrema, Rynhotreta, Meekalla, Hustedia, are some of the possible species represented in this handful. I wish I could find my book with more detailed information on the geology and fossils specific to the Tulsa area. I would be more certain about identifying these fossils.

Fri, 20 Jan 2006 02:56:54 GMT

THE FOSSIL OF THE DAY: PHYLUM BRYOZOA

Bryozoans are colony or mass animals. They start as plankton; when a larva finds a place to settle down, on what the textbook refers to as "a firm substrate," it buds off its own buddies, new individuals that form the colony. Sometimes the colonies look like lace fans, though there are many species and many different forms. The ones that form latticelike sheets with a single layer of zooecia (the colonial buddies) on each side belong to Order Cryptostomata, and the lacy fan or funnel shaped colonies are of the genus Fenestella. Alas, Fenestella was one of the genera wiped out in the great Permian extinction, about 248 million years ago. The fossils pictured and are at least 40 million years older than that, and I believe them to be examples of Fenestella.

I have found fragments of Fenestella at sites all over Tulsa County. Often little fragments are mixed in the "substrate" with pieces of crinoids, brachiopods, rugose sponges and what all else. Stone soup. Petrified Bouillabaisse. It would be something quite extraordinary to find a complete or near complete Fenestella fan colony.

Next: Back to Tall Chief?

Thu, 19 Jan 2006 04:12:37 GMT

ANOTHER URBAN STREET FOSSIL

Like my fish, these fossil fragments I found deposited on pavement, in this case the concrete stoop of a friend's apartment in Midtown Tulsa, next to a pot of ivy. When I inquired of her where these GREAT HONKING PIECES OF AMMONITE came from, my friend said something vague about a neighbor who was going to throw them away, and that she asked for a couple of pieces (THERE WERE MORE?), just the thing to decorate her porch. I was sorely, sorely tempted to come back in the dead of night and steal them; but, she is a friend, so I settled for coming back in the dead of night and photographing them. People ask me where I find fossils in Tulsa; I find them everywhere.

Wed, 18 Jan 2006 03:45:21 GMT

TALL CHIEF BRACHIOPODS

If you can find the convenience store with a war bonnet on top, you're getting warm.

Watch out for snakes.

This is the sort of rock you're looking for.

This is what you may find inside.

A brachiopod. Linoproductus? Or Reticulatia?

Juresania?

Another Linoproductus?

Sun, 15 Jan 2006 04:41:06 GMT

THE FOSSIL OF THE DAY

DENVER ALLEY FOSSIL

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.

Thu, 24 Nov 2005 06:13:56 GMT

A PIECE OF BARK

I did a last drive by at the Yale St construction site not too long ago, mainly to gather material from the labyrinth I'm building in my backyard. Fossils aside the striped stone there is beautiful in and of itself. I found the above bit of 300 million year old bark among the debris ground under the treads of the killdozers and shovelsauruses the contracters use to make war on the unruly rolling hills round about Tulsa . The Hwy. 75 site has been almost completely landscaped and turfed over, alas. Slim pickin's for scavenger fossickers like me.

Sun, 03 Jul 2005 22:15:46 GMT

A CHUNK OF AMMONITE

This is a close up scan of the ammonite fossil fragment shown on the left...buttock of the butt rock featured in the previous post. I have no idea where it came from, or its era or species. As I previously stated, I bought it at an estate sale for 50 cents, more as memento to the man who had died and left his things to be pawed over by strangers. I passed his house quite often, he was a tall white haired man in an immaculate suit who kept an immaculate garden around an immaculate two story brick house, in an otherwise somewhat rundown neighborhood. He was a musician, a pianist, and played bells, of which he had a large set. He also collected fossils.

Edge on views of alleged ammonite.

I somehow suspect my 50 cent investment in the mystery of Life's history to be of Cretaceous vintage. Cretaceous time was somewhat of a heyday for ammonites and cephalopods in general..Polished Ammonites are very commonly sold in Malls and bookstores and are very commonly fakes. If you do buy one, at least you are supporting the family of a humble Moroccan craftsman. My fossil fragment is not so pretty, but I think it is real.

I got out one of my text books. It's a hundred and two years old, but they just don't do plates like this anymore:

There's a bit of family resemblance, don't you think?

Mon, 27 Jun 2005 13:41:42 GMT

THE BUTT ROCK

This chunk of grey shale was shaped by long vanished flowing water millions of years ago. My stepdaughter Leila insisted that I haul it a quarter of a mile back to the two-lane, over uneven ground along Delaware Creek, which by the way is in Osage, not Tulsa County. It has rested ever since on the narrow shelf on the upright piano a friend gave us tho' none of us plays piano. The piano has become our altar, our temenos, to an ecumenical collection of odd pagan kitsch. To the left of the butt rock (as it was instantly christened by Leila) is a chunk of ammonite I bought at an Estate Sale for 50 cents. To the right is a snapshot of a very young Dr. Omed.

Fri, 17 Jun 2005 22:47:33 GMT

SOMETHING FERNY THIS WAY COMES

Mimosa "twig" harvested last night on my chalk walk; a frond plucked from the fern hanging in our garden, and 300 million year old carbonized remains of Neuropteris, and Pecopteris fern foliage. Just for Ms. Candide. Mimosas are rather odd trees; I'll have to do a bit of research on 'em, but not right now. Tonight is the fifth anniversary of Elspeth and I's marriage, performed by the roadside turnout on Magnetic Mountain above Eureka Springs, Arkansas, by a woman with an altar to her guru on the dashboard of her beat up Chevy mini. She was a superlative, and legal "minister."

Mon, 13 Jun 2005 04:47:11 GMT

STOLEN TREASURES

Here below is a little album of the stolen property kiped from the Hwy. 75 contruction site. I don't really need to risk arrest for trespassing on the Oklahoma Dept. of Transportion's domain, I have already filled my garage full of fossil bearing shale from their excavation. I'm so sorry that the fossils I've stolen won't be ground to dust under the treads of their earthmoving equipment, or hauled off to a landfill. A real paleontologist might just file suit to prevent them from destroying anymore of the fossil strata they've exposed. Shut 'em down, 'til the scientists get a chance to sort things out.

I'm feeling a bit lazy, and it is past my bedtime, so I'm not hauling out my textbooks in order to provide chapter and verse for these fossil images. We'll leave the lecture on Late Carboniferous flora for another time.

Thu, 09 Jun 2005 00:46:02 GMT

POSTED TODAY ON THE CHANNEL EIGHT WEBSITE:

ODOT: Fossil Hunters Stay Away From Construction Project

Wednesday June 08, 2005 10:57am Posted By: Kevin King

Tulsa - The Oklahoma Department of Transportation is warning fossil diggers and the public that they are creating a serious safety issue unless they stay clear of a construction site near Highway 75 and 71st Street South.

DOT officials say they had a few trespassers since the start of construction earlier this year, but that since a report about fossils being discovered in the area, the trespassing has increased dramatically.

"Trespassing and stolen property issues aside, we cannot have people walking around a construction site," says ODOT Project Engineer Matt Moshiri. "With all of the heavy equipment, dirt movement and materials out there, we can't guarantee anyone's safety. It's a dangerous place for the public to be."

Moshiri says the discovery and removal of the fossils was done without the knowledge or approval of ODOT officials or Sherwood Construction, which is the project contractor. (Well, duh. I was quite well aware that I was trespassing.)

Construction of the widening and interchange project at 71st Street is expected to be complete by this time next year.

I wonder if that means they'll put security on the site during off hours and weekends. As far as I know, no one has been hurt or harassed while collecting fossils on the Hwy. 75, other than a flare up of my tendonitis one weekend. I don't believe the contractor or the Hwy. Dept. understand what a lagerstatten (motherlode) of Carboniferous plant fossils they've uncovered with their precious bulldozers. Perhaps they ought to consult a State Geologist, or the National Geological Survey.

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 09:23:10 GMT

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.

Wed, 01 Jun 2005 08:15:16 GMT

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.

Tue, 24 May 2005 23:15:52 GMT

FOSSILS I HAVEN'T FOUND: ADDENDUM

I was consulting my reference books on trilobites last night, storing up jargon for future posts. Allow me to share with you this classic collop of scientific prose at its most high falutin', extracted from E.N.K. Clarkson's Invertebrate Paleontology and Evolution:

Also to be found in post-Cambrian stocks, notably the Family Asaphidae, are small protuberances on the inner faces of the thoricac doublures, which presuming acted as stops preventing overgliding of the pleura as they came to rest during enrollment. These are the organs of Pander; they are not to be confused with panderian openings which, though similarly located, probably were the orifices of some kind of segmented and possibly excretory organs.

Mon, 23 May 2005 04:57:09 GMT

FOSSILS I HAVEN'T FOUND: TRILOBITES

Huntonia oklahomae, Dicranurus elegantus, and Homotelus bromidensis

I have yet to find a trilobite. This is somewhat ironic, since Oklahoma is known for fine and abundant specimens of Class Trilobita among fossil collectors and paleontogists, and trilobites are probably the most well known fossils among the general public after dinosaurs. The trilobites shown above were collected in the Arbuckle Mountains and Coal County in southern Oklahoma, and date to Devonian, Silurian, and Ordovician time (350 to 500 million years ago). That was before Tulsa time (the late Carboniferous, 325 to 286 million years ago). Trilobites first appeared during Cambrian "Explosion" 540 years ago when many new and diverse forms of life--sea life, no life on land yet--suddenly appear the fossil record. They were the first arthropods; other arthropods are insects and crustaceans. The last trilobites died in the mass extinction at the end the Permian 250 million years ago, when 90 percent of all species died off (much worse than the Cretaceous extinction which took out the dinosaurs). The trilobites had a good run of close to 300 million years, much longer than we'll last I assure you, and were diverse and dominant in the ancient seas for much of that time. Trilobites were one of the first organism to evolve complex compound eyes; some of them had a 360 degree field of vision, which may be one reason they survived for so long. They walked on the sea bottom, leaving tracks that sometimes are found fossilized, and some of them could roll up like a pill bug, and such species of trilobites are often found that way. Ordovician time was somewhat of a heyday for trilobites. By Tulsa time they had dwindled to one order, Proetida, but trilobites were still around, and as I said I haven't found one, at least not one that I have recognized as such. The images above are of fossils that have been beautifully and professionally cleaned and prepared for display, they don't look like that when they are first found. I am very much a beginner at preserving and cleaning fossils, it takes a great deal of patience and care and you can easily break or even destroy the fossil you are trying to save and enhance. If I ever find something really extraordinary I would take it to a real paleontogist to clean and identify it. I have read in papers published by the Tulsa Geological Society in the early 1970s that trilobites are to be found in Tulsa County, particularly in to the west of Tulsa near old Hwy. 51, and around Keystone Dam on the Arkansas River. So I offer my prayers to Our Lady of Fossils, and keep looking.

Fri, 20 May 2005 03:51:17 GMT

This evening I dug out my copy of John McPhee's Annals of the Former World. In my library I do have to dig through strata of accumulated books to find the one I want, more so than I do out on the hunt for fossils. McPhee writes such lovely prose, and if you want to know about deep time and the geology of the North American continent, not to mention the geologists that study them, he's your man and is the book. This is his description of the late Carboniferous landscape:

"...vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. They were not huge by our standards but they were big trees, some with diamond patterns precisioned in their bark.

Collected at Lake Keystone, west of Tulsa

They had thick boles and were about a hundred feet high. Other trees had bark like the bark of hemlocks and leaves like flat straps. Others had the fluted, swollen bases of cypress.

Tree trunk segments from Seminole Formation shale at Hwy. 75 excavation

In and out among the trunks flew dragonflies with the wingspans of great horned owls. Amphibians not only were walking around easily but some of them had become reptiles. Through the high meshing crowns of the trees not a whole lot of light filtered down. The understory was all but woven-of rushlke woody plants and seed ferns.

Slab of fossil foliage, also collected at Hwy. 75 site

There were luxuriant tree ferns as much as fifty feet high. The scene suggests a tropical rain forest but was more akin to the Everglades, the Dismal Swamp, the Atchafalaya basin-a hummocky spongy landscape ending in a ragged coast."

Fri, 20 May 2005 01:16:16 GMT

I meant to put links to previous posts on the Tent Show concerning fossils at the end of the first post on this new category, but forgot. It was the end of a long day. I was very tired. So here they are. Click an image and whisk away to read a post.

Wed, 18 May 2005 23:16:44 GMT

Neuropteris ovata and Neuropteris scheuchzeri (gient tree ferns).

I live in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I hunt fossils. I am a lucky man. There is fossil bearing rock exposed in outcrops, by erosion and excavation all around the area. Today when someone calls something a fossil, they mean it's really old, older than dirt. Paleontogists define the word strictly and only as the naturally preserved remains or traces of animals and plants that lived in the geologic past more or less prior to that tiny sliver of time we call human history, and generally the deep past. Hundreds of millions of years ago. But "really, really old" is not the root meaning of "fossil." The word fossil is from the Latin fossilis, meaning "dug up," though most of time I pick them up, pry them out, and/or break them out of a rock with a hammer and chisel. I hardly ever dig them up. I let Nature or the Hand of Man as represented by the earthmoving equiment of State Highway Department or quarries do the digging for me, mostly. What I do is fossick for fossils. Fossick is a word donated to English by Australian gold miners, and means to rummage about old diggings.

A line of 'dozers at Hwy. 75.

Seminole Formation cut at Hwy. 75. Limestone above, shale below. Fossil site just forward of my car.

Fossils are found in sedimentary rock, formed from material deposited by the action of wind and water. Sandstone, limestone, shale, are all sedimentary rocks, and Tulsa has all these as bedrock, layered like a cake. The rock in Tulsa dates back to the later half of the Carboniferous Period, 286 to 325 million years ago. The fossiliferous shale shown above is, to give a very rough estimate, about 300 million years old. Give or take. That's 1/15 of the time of the four and half billion years or so the Earth has existed. It's 50,000 times the 6000 years elasped since God created the Earth, as per the King James Version cherished by Creation "Science." It's 75 million years before dinosaurs began to rule the Earth. Give or take. Amphibians had their heyday in the Carboniferous, and early reptiles were the latest thing in terrestrial vertebrates, and insects were the first living things to grow wings and take flight. We're talking dragonflies with two foot wingspans. Plants reproduced by wind born spores, and needed to be close to water. Innovations such as true seeds, fruit, and flowers had not yet evolved and were in fact far in the future.

During the Carboniferous, due the action of plate tectonics, a good deal of the planet's land was, well, massing in the over the south pole and the high latitudes of the southern hemisphere. Lots of landmass in high latitudes sets the stage for an ice age, which indeed occured at this time. Tulsa was situated in the tropics. As the glacial ice advanced and retreated, sea level fell and rose. Coast marshes would be drowned by the sea, or covered by the sand of a river delta. The Quachita orogeny was also occuring around that time, in Arkansas, and south of Tulsa in SE OKlahoma. Mountains rising higher than the Rockies, erosion wearing them down, to the still rugged nubbins we still refer to as "mountains" here in Okieville.

Marine invertebrates: Crinoid stems, and a brachiopod,

Thus far I have collected two different kinds of fossil "assemblages," marine invertebrates, and terrestrial plants. Road crews have recently been at work, widening Yale Ave. between 71st and 81st Streets, and widening and lowering Highway 75 at 71st Street, tearing into the rock of the Seminole formation, and exposing a motherlode of plant fossils at each location. Gleaning after quitting time, but wearing my hard hat and reflective orange vest as protective coloration, I have greatly enhanced my collection of plant fossils (filled the garage full of rocks, from my wife's point of view).

Seminole Shale seam at 71st and Hwy. 75

Annularia stellata (Giant Horsetail foliage) collected at Hwy. 75

Calamites Suckowi (Giant Horsetail stems) collected at Yale Ave.

Yale Ave. site

One last note: I'm not really a paleontogist, I just play one on this blog. If I have misidentified any of the fossils, or have otherwise gotten the details wrong, I apologize in advance to any professional paleontologists, and will be grateful to recieve correction. Happy trails, preferably trilobite trails, 'til next post.