Fossils for Charity
3 messages in this thread
Joe — Just curious if you got the MAIL message I sent you. It was the first
non-forum message I've tried to send using OZCIS and it looked garbled going
out. I tried to send a follow up which somehow got sent to me "from" my 14
year old son. I may have to switch back to CIM for Mail.
Don,
I got the message.
And I also struck out this weekend. There are only three
exposed roadcuts now, and none of them had exposed
bedrock. There was lots of loose rock (scree?) that had
been picked clean. It might be a good place to try next
year in the spring.
BTW, I also went down to Ceasar Creek. It sucked too.
They won't let you use tools, and you can't pick up
anything bigger than the palm of your hand. I walked
out with 2 horn corals.
Sorry,
Joe
Hmmm. Something wrong here. I collected occasionally in those road cuts from
1974 until as recently as 1990. While they were becoming somewhat overgrown, I
think they were good for another 20 years. There were some small areas of
non-fossiliferous glacial overlay in a couple of the cuts, but I doubt you
could have had the bad luck to hit nothing but those. There wasn't a lot of
bedrock exposed, and I should have made that clear — you don't WANT to collect
in the bedrock unless you become very curious about the geology and
paleontology– that's hard work. And the limestones are fossil hashes that you
have to put out in your backyard for a decade or so to get broken down. The
fossils are weathered out and laying loose on the hillsides — roughly one
"pebble" (a bad term — we're talking about entities 1-3 cm in maximum
dimension) in ten should be a fossil of some sort. (If you are determined to
get to the bedrock, it's there, under a few inches of clay/mud).
I guess, I'd recommend that you try again in the springtime when the overgrowth
has been beaten down and you can see clearly what can be seen. (be muddy
though). Try any roadcut you can find South and West of the Greene/Warren
County line.
Better yet, contact the Cincinnati Dry Dredgers, Department of Geology,
University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH 45221-0013, and see if you can hook up
with one of their fieldtrips. The phone contacts in my 1994 MAPS Directory are
Jack Kallmeyer 513-433-9786 and Greg Hand 513-556-1822.
Sorry for sending you on a wild goose chase — can't imagine what the problem
could be.