Fossil Hunting

Hello again friends,

I got to go on such an awesome adventure yesterday! My friend took me fossil hunting in one of the many gorges in Ithaca. Fossils were something I've only seen in a museum (due to the fact that my home was once the Chicago field museum) and I was surprised how abundant and relatively easy to find these fossils were. These fossils could have been anywhere between 360 and 450 MILLION years old!!!

This is the trail leading the path that goes down into the gorge. If you look carefully you can see the suspension bridge in the background behind those trees.

The bottom of the gorge looked a lot bigger and a lot more intimidating the closer to the bottom we got...

Yay! the last set of steps! So close...

We made it! It was a bit of a walk down, and I was afraid to imagine the walk back up. But here I am in the gorge.

How you go "fossil hunting" is pretty simple. All you really need to do once you get down into the gorge is start turning over rocks. Sometimes it may help to split rocks too. My friend did that and found a really nice crinoid fossil. But even if you don't split rocks you're bound to find one (or two, or three, or more!).

Is there one under here? Nope... gotta keep looking!

Here's one really cool fossil that I found. I wasn't quite sure what this armadillo-looking fossil was, but I suspect it may be a brachiopod of ancient times.

Here I am with the fossils that I found. I got some nice brachiopods, some clams, some crinoids, perhaps some cnidarians, and certainly a lot of well-preserved extinct "honeycomb" coral.

Well friends, that pretty much sums up my fossil-hunting experience. If any of you ever venture down to Ithaca, I would definitely recommend doing this. If you want more information on what you can find here, look at this site: http://www.priweb.org/ed-/finger_lakes/nystate_geo6.html.

That'll be it for now. Best until next time!

LFM