Wednesday afternoon southern Utah Fossil hunting.

[SPrice]

Due to the weather, there was a one to two night opportunity for a Milky Way season ending astrophotography session. The new moon was on September 2nd and the window was closing as both clouds were forecast and the crescent moon would be waxing  into the night sky shortly.  So Wednesday night it was.

 

But along the way there was a choice opportunity to swing by the Juana Lopez formation areas on the way and see what the recent monsoon rains flooding revealed. While driving south I noticed off road construction here and there rebuilding the drainage ditches and such from being overwhelmed and washed out.  This gave me hope that the areas I've hunted earlier this year for ammonites just might be eroded from the rains and offering new finds in the ditches and gullies.

 

I was not let down. I lost count of how many more 25 to 50 KG concretions had been exposed and rolled along with the flood waters. Let's get to the pics and see what I saw.

 

The location is kind of strange to me being from the east coast with more trees than humans and here ( even after 19 years of living in Utah ) there are large tracts of land without any trees. 

 

This is one of those places, just slightly rolling hills with eroded drainages. And the strangeness being that one can park a vehicle and walk any direction and find concretions containing fossils.

 

It doesn't even feel like "hunting" for fossils or even searching...more like the dirt road is the parking lot and you just  walk through the outdoor Fossil-Mart and choose the ones you like. And yes, I do recognize this is a limited finite resource...so I just "window shopped" to find just the one. These have been here 50 million plus years and over 100 plus years of humans walking and seeing the fossils underfoot. There are hundreds strewn about in just a couple of acres. My pet theory is there is a high percentage of ammonites in the concretion located here. It seemed on this day to be 50 to 60 percent of the ones I put eyes on and flipped over had an ammonite partially exposed. So, IMO, an even higher total percentage could be extrapolated.

 

This sloping hillside has 12-15 visible in the image. Many were already excavated or flipped by previous searchers.

 

 

And another area nearby with exposed concretions. Looks like an ammonite protruding in the lower right concretion.

 

 

My Honda Element in the Fossil-mart parking lot. I'm standing in " aisle 3 " , the crumbling concretions display.

 

 

 

A couple more excavated ones having been flipped.

 

 

More.

 

 

 

A few more in aisle 4. 

 

 

 

And then upon closer inspection of those excavated was the weird part. Ammonites embedded in concretions in almost half of the ones in the above pics. 

 

First one I flipped...ammonite. 

 

 

I wasn't planning on too much fossil hunting and had my mind of the star show upcoming that evening.  And with that in mind...I left all the fossil collecting tools right down to the rock hammer. I looked in my car later and found a cat's paw and my World War Two Dutch klappspaten. The Germans pretty much invented the trenching tool/folding shovel and many countries followed suit in copying it. Mine is excellent condition and is used as it is intended...for digging... and is always in my car...just in case.

 

This also included my measuring card. My watch case is 56mm wide.

 

..

 

 

 

 

This one was really hard to walk away from. In fact it was also hard to lift and carry very far. So I stashed it for retrieval on another day.  Can you imagine the previous hunters passing this up? I can't . It looks like it is intact based on my guess from seeing the exposed section of the whorl.  It was in the 35- 40 kilo weight category.  

 

 

A beauty and was my second best choice. 

 

 

Can you see this one?

 

 

Can you see it now? Matrix and outer whorl have a thin crack on the top left.

 

 

Here's a nice partial and it shows the distinct calcite coating on the brown fossil where it was exposed over time.

 

 

And one cracked open without the calcite coating.

 

 

The ubiquitous scorpion under a rock. 

 

 

Another partial.

 

 

Another scorpion...they can run as fast as a cockroach or wolf spider.

 

 

 

This one caught my eye. An eroded ditch bank with a concretion in situ with a partially exposed ammonite.

 

 

Where's my extraction tools? Oh yeah, in the parking lot and I'm in aisle 14...that's a bit of a hike.

 

 

Time for intermission. I grabbed my shovel and cat's paw and did a play by play extraction, plus a weight loss field prep to leave some pounds behind. 

 

Steve

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 8 by SPrice
typos...again

[SPrice]

Okay, break's over...back to work. 

 

After a little digging around the concretion, it came out of the ditch bank wall nicely. These concretions are fairly solid...until... the first tap...and the cracks reveal themselves nicely.

 

 

That big chunk in the center is the first to go. The catspaw is a nail removing tool with good leverage. It did the job.

 

 

One little bit at a time.

 

 

 

 

 

Catspaw on the left.  It's looking to me like the center may be blown out. The crack in the center opened up a bit more and I slowed way down to choose a stopping point soon.

 

 

Pry, wedge, slowly  and be ready to stop. This big chunk separated from the fossil well.

 

 

The chunk is laying below the outer whorl. 

 

 

I keep thinking I should had brought my tools, especially lots of super glue and kicker.

 

 

One more piece to remove as it has already gotten loose.  The triangle on the top.

 

 

 

I'm pointing at the crack and about to wedge it off.

 

 

And off it is. Whew!!

 

 

Time to stop and hike to my car.  it's always uphill, through several ditches and I didn't mention the mosquitos were chewing me to bits. The rains had refilled the nearby desert lake and migratory waterfowl sanctuary bringing instant life to lots of water borne insects.

 

I wrapped and padded the ammonite into a milk crate for the road trip to the deep desert and after the star show and a short night's sleep, it's back home.

 

We have had several wildfires in Oregon and Idaho which smoked out most of northern Utah in less than a day on Wednesday morning. I could see it to the north but luckily the Milky Way is to our south.  The next morning the smoke was upon me. Actually, I had my 3 cameras running before 9 pm and around midnight the core of the Milky Way was sinking below the horizon and I saw a layer of smoke on the horizon when I zoomed in on the last photos.

 

 

 

Here's the post sunset and the smoke is on the right to the north heading towards me overnight.

 

 

 

Here was the sunrise.

 

 

I'm going to Alaska next weekend for the annual fishing trip to fill the freezer with salmon and halibut.  After that I may make a return trip and collect the stashed ammonite concretion I left behind.  Then in October before it gets too cold I'm heading to the Cowboy Pass ammonite beds over on the western part of the state near Nevada.  And that should do it for me this year.

 

Steve

 

 

 

 

 

Edited September 8 by SPrice

[Kohler Palaeontology]

Very nice finds! That scorpion looks like the genus Centruroides, possibly an Arizona Bark Scorpion.

[SPrice]

6 hours ago, Kohler Palaeontology said:

Very nice finds! That scorpion looks like the genus Centruroides, possibly an Arizona Bark Scorpion.

 

The Arizona Bark Scorpion is the only species in Utah with a possible lethal sting. And because of that I researched scorpions in our state and became as familiar as possible with the ones I might encounter during my excursions in the desert. Supposedly the bark scorpion only occurs in the bottom county on the Arizona border. The red county on the map.

 

 

I haven't been in that county since 2018 on a trip to the Grand Canyon with the family.  However, I'm sure scorpions aren't reading maps or regarding county or state borders.

 

My research tells me this:  "These are specimens of the Northern Scorpion (Paruroctonus boreus) reaching around 5 cm in length. These scorpions are unique in that their range reaches as far north as Canada. These scorpions can be found all throughout Utah." 

 

Also the Bark Scorpions are known to be arboreal. So I stay away from what few trees I encounter and at night carry a UV light to inspect a potential spot for setting up camp or camera sites. I will then relocate if there's a lot of scorpions or relocate the scorpions a few dozens meters away from me.  I have encountered many at night with the UV light and sometimes feel I was more comfortable before my son gifted me the UV light.  So no matter which species I encounter, I consider any of them as potentially harmful and behave accordingly.

 

The Opuntia polyacantha cactus is a more real threat to harm me at night than the scorpion. They have 80mm + lengths of hard spines which can pierce normal footwear with ease. Hence my heavy duty hiking boots. I can't always see them at night and they don't fluoresce under UV light.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Kohler Palaeontology]

Pretty cool! I know more about my Aussie scorpions, they're my favorite out of the "creepy crawlies"