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The 13-year-old discovered the cache on her third metal-detecting outing. Courtesy of Colin Hardwick
The Cool Finds column blog at Smithsonian Magazine has a story about the discovery of Bronze Age axes. Milly Hardwick, a 13-year-old from Suffolk, stumbled onto a cache of 65 artifacts dated to around 1300 B.C.E, while on a metal detecting outing.
Milly Hardwick was searching for buried treasure in a field in Hertfordshire, England, when her metal detector pinged. The 13-year-old’s father, Colin, joked that she’d found an ax. He was partially right: Hardwick had, in fact, stumbled onto a trove of 65 Bronze Age axes and artifacts dated to around 1300 B.C.E.
“I was shocked,” the teenager, who made the discovery on her third metal-detecting outing, tells Sarah Cooper of ITV News Anglia. “I almost fainted. I was like, ‘Dad, I’m going to faint!’”
Per Jacob Paul of the Express, Hardwick’s mother, Claire, adds, “A lot of people have said it’s a once-in-a-lifetime find.”
This is the "Fossil Friday" post #86. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world!
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There are a few species of shark egg cases known from Mazon Creek. Today, we have a somewhat common, but no less beautiful specimen of Palaeoxyris prendelli. Remember, that is common for a Mazon Creek shark egg case fossil. In general, shark egg cases are very rare in the fossil record. P. prendelli was described by Leo Lesquereux in 1870 from fossils found in Lancashire, England. Lesquereux was a Swiss born bryologist and a pioneer in American paleobotany. In George Langford's time, these fossils were thought to be a plant part. We now know that was wrong, For more information, see the Field Museum guide written by Jack Wittry. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Palaeoxyris.
Palaeoxyris is the prehistoric shark egg capsule morphotype of the family Hybodontidae with a predominant occurrence in ancient freshwater environments. They comprise a beak, a body and a pedicle, with the beak merging into the body. They display a conspicuous right-handed spiral of ridges around the body, and in some cases, the pedicle.[1] Originally described as plant remains and controversially discussed within the floral kingdom it took decades before their true nature as animal eggs was revealed.[2]
The specimen below comes from long time ESCONI member Marie Angkuw. Thanks for the contribution, Marie! It's very nice! It seems like you have been finding quite a bit lately... She sent it in with this short description. No locality information was given.
This nice oval concretion shows hammer marks and I suspect was tossed away. Later, a chip revealing the fossil must have freeze/thawed its way off.
This is Throwback Thursday #88. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc ...), please sent them to [email protected]. Thanks!
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From the December 1971 newsletter
25 Years Ago - December 1996
50 Years Ago - December 1971
70 Years Ago - December 1951
Live Science has a story about some facial reconstruction performed on a Bronze Age woman's skull. Researchers in Spain, discovered the remains of the woman in 2014. She was buried with lavish jewelry - including a diadem, beaded necklaces, silver-crafted rings, bracelets, spiral hairpieces and earplugs with spirals, as well as a silver-rimmed drinking pot and silver-handled awl, a tool used to piece textiles. The find was described in the journal Antiquity earlier this year.
A "powerful, maybe even frightening" woman buried with a silver diadem in Bronze Age Spain now has a virtually reconstructed face that shows her wearing a serene expression and huge hoop earrings dangling from earplugs.
Earlier this year, researchers announced they had discovered the woman's and a man's remains interred together in a large ceramic pot buried in what was likely an ancient palace. The man had died a few years before the woman; after she died at a later date, someone reopened the pot and placed her body next to his. Now, using the partial skull and jewelry from the burial, a scientific Illustrator has digitally recreated the woman's face, as well as the faces of others buried at the site, known as La Almoloya.
"The biggest challenge about this facial reconstruction was that the upper portion of her skull did not survive the ages," Joana Bruno, the freelance scientific illustrator who created the digital reconstructions and a collaborator with the La Almoloya archaeologists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, told Live Science in an email. "Luckily, the diadem (the silver crown) was found in place, around her head, so that gives us some measure for her head, but it was still a challenge."
This is Mazon Monday post #89. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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Of all the millions (yes, millions!) of Mazon concretions that have opened over the years, only two specimens of Jeletzkya douglassae are known. That might make it the rarest of species in the Mazon Creek biota. It's considered to be a squid. Talk about soft bodied animals... its only hard parts are the radula and the pen. For as rare as it is, it has a Wikipedia page!
It was described in 1968 by Ralph Gordon Johnson and Eugene S. Richardson, Jr. The description appeared in the journal Science "Ten Armed Fossil Cephalopod from the Pennsylvanian of Illinois". Both men are giants in Mazon Creek paleontology. At that time, they worked at the Field Museum in Chicago and fostered relationships with amateur collectors who were all to happy to show them what they had found.
Abstract
Jeletzkya douglassae Johnson and Richardson is described as the oldest known representative of an extant squid group. The species is known from a single specimen from the Middle Pennsylvanian of Illinois. This very unusual fossil consists of the complete tentacular crown and a fragile shell. The arms bear hooks in double rows.
The animal is named for June Douglass, the mother of Dave Douglass who would eventually open "Dave's Down to Earth Rock Shop" in Evanston, IL in 1970. June and her family, husband Lincoln and son Dave, started collecting Mazon Creek fossils in 1958. All three of them have species named for them. Lincoln has Mischoptera douglassi, a winged insect that Eugene Richardson called "one of the most important fossil insects ever found." And, Dave was the namesake for Titanoscorpio douglassi, a 3 inch scorpion claw. When June found the squid fossil in Pit 11, it pushed back the fossil history of squid 100 million years to the Pennsylvanian Period. The original specimen is on display in the basement museum at Dave's.
The other specimen was donated to the Field Museum by amateur collector Dave Young.
J. douglassae appears in "The Mazon Creek Fossil Fauna" by Jack Wittry.
Jeletzkya douglassae is generally considered to be a squid, though it has been argued that it may be a belemnite. Assignment remains problematic. It has ten arms, and an internal shell similar to the gladius (pen) of present-day squid. Made of a chiton-like material, the pen is a feather-shaped internal structure that supports the squid's mantle and serves as a site for muscle attachment. However, the double rows of hooks on each arm may be a feature more similar to belemnites. It has been suggested that the internal shell rep resents a belemnitid prostracum with only the final phragmocone chamber attached. The radular pattern of J. douglassae is the same as modern coleoids, though belemnoid radulae are not known. Single rows of arm hooks occur in modern squid, and it has been thought that perhaps double rows as well as undifferentiated arms are primitive characteristics of these coleoid cephalopods. Fossil ink sacs are are found in the Essex Biota, but are known from both squid and belemnoids.
A rare Mazon Creek cephalopod, J. douglassae was erected based on the two fossils shown below. The first is the holotype, which displays the nine elements of the radula, and ten equal-sized arms, each having two rows of hooks. The second is of an internal shell that is missing part of the apex. This area at the apex is still not well known. The internal shell is decorated with longitudinal parallel lines near the apex.
Specimens
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The simple coin design was quickly replaced, leaving only 40 or so surviving specimens today. Courtesy of Morton and Eden
The Cool Finds column at Smithsonian Magazine has a story about a remarkable find. A one shilling coin minted in 1652 by the Massachusetts Bay Colony was found in a candy tin. One of 40 known to exist, it was sold at auction for $351,912.
A silver coin minted in colonial Boston in 1652 has sold for $351,912. The one shilling coin is one of just 40 of its kind known to survive today, the Associated Press (AP) reports.
“I am not surprised at the amount of interest this exceptional coin attracted,” says James Morton, a coin specialist with London-based auction house Morton and Eden, in a statement. “The price paid ... reflects its extraordinary historic significance and outstanding original state of preservation. The fact that it was previously completely unknown, together with its distinguished provenance, simply added to its appeal.”
Morton and Eden sold the coin on behalf of Wentworth “Wenty” Beaumont, a descendant of early New England settler William Wentworth. Beaumont’s father recently discovered the artifact in a candy tin containing hundreds of old coins at the family’s estate in Northumberland, England.
“I can only assume that the shilling was brought back from America years ago by one of my forebears,” says Beaumont in the statement.
After the long-forgotten tin resurfaced, Beaumont brought it to Morton, who realized that the container included specimens from all over the world, spanning the ancient era through the 1970s, reports Sophie Corcoran for PA Media.
“I could see straight away that there were plenty of interesting pieces alongside some ordinary modern coins, but there was one simple silver disc which immediately jumped out at me,” says Morton in a separate Morton and Eden statement. “I could hardly believe my eyes when I realized that it was an excellent example of a New England shilling, struck by John Hull in 1652 in Boston for use as currency by early settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.”
ESCONI member William Morgan, a retired professor from the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, has a new book called "Collector's Guide to Fort Payne Crinoids and Blastoids". The Fort Payne Formation of Kentucky dates to the early Mississippian Period.
The focus of this book is on the Fort Payne Formation and the fossil crinoids and blastoids, which are found there. Although, it is not widely known outside of academic programs in geology and/or paleontology, the Fort Payne is one the largest Mississippian-age formations in the middle and southeastern United States.
Unlike the crinoids found in the Edwardsville Formation, which are world-renown for their completeness and aesthetic qualities, crinoids from the Fort Payne are rarely complete. Therefore, the first chapter of the book introduces the anatomy and the descriptive terminology essential for identifying crinoids collected from the Fort Payne.
The second chapter of the book introduces the ongoing revision of the classification of crinoids. This process was still ongoing at the time that is book was written.
The third chapter briefly reviews the better known of the fossilfiorous formations found in the Mississippian. More detail is provided for the geology and paleontology of the Fort Payne.
Collections of crinoids and blastoids from the Fort Payne are rarely publically displayed. Therefore, Chapter four proves high quality color photographs of some the best preserved specimens curated at major museums in the United States. In almost every case there are two photographs of each specimen, one unlabeled and a second with key features labeled and identified.
The fifth chapter reviews the morphology of blastoids and discusses the blastoids species currently known from the Fort Payne.
This is the "Fossil Friday" post #85. Expect this to be a somewhat regular feature of the website. We will post any fossil pictures you send in to [email protected]. Please include a short description or story. Check the #FossilFriday Twitter hash tag for contributions from around the world!
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You might recall that this year ESCONI had a couple field trips to a Danville, IL area spoil pile to collect fossils. There was a spring and a fall trip and we expect to return next spring. They were productive trips with many new and exciting finds for everyone. Most of the fossils were found in "red dog" shale, which is shale that was baked to a hardness when the spoil pile caught fire years ago. However, there were also fossil bearing concretions. Some were found open and others were collected for the freeze/thaw processing common with Mazon Creek concretions.
Earlier this week, one popped open! This is a Callipteridium neuropteroides, a seed fern similar to Alethoperis and Neuropteris. It has been in an out of the freezer since July, maybe 30 - 35 cycles.
Here is a photo of the outside of the concretion. Not as smooth as those found in the Mazon Creek deposits,
Open concretion.
This is Throwback Thursday #87. In these, we look back into the past at ESCONI specifically and Earth Science in general. If you have any contributions, (science, pictures, stories, etc ...), please sent them to [email protected]. Thanks!
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Field & Street was a column in the Chicago Reader from at least 1984 until April 2004. For most of its existence, it was written by Jerry Sullivan and ran bi-weekly. The Reader has an archive of many of the columns on their website. In case you haven't heard of the Chicago Reader, it's a free Chicago weekly newspaper that has been published since 1971. They bill themselves as "Chicago's alternative nonprofit newsroom". The Chicago Reader is the paper that published the "The Vanishing Mother Lode of Mazon Creek" in 2004.
Jerry Sullivan (1938-2000) was a career naturalist and journalist, who besides writing the "Field & Street" column, served as the associate director for land management with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County until his untimely death in 2000. The University of Chicago Press has a book that contains a collection of his columns. It's an interesting read.
A selection of savvy observations on urban ecology from one of the Midwest’s foremost authorities on the subject, Hunting for Frogs on Elston collects the best of naturalist Jerry Sullivan’s weekly Field & Street columns, originally published in the Chicago Reader. Engaging, opinionated, inspiring, and occasionally irreverent, Hunting for Frogs on Elston pays tribute to Chicago’s natural history while celebrating one of its greatest champions.
Published in association with the Chicago Wilderness coalition, Hunting for Frogs on Elston comprehensively chronicles Chicagoland’s unique urban ecology, from its indigenous prairie and oft-delayed seasons to its urban coyotes and passenger pigeons. In witty, informed prose, Sullivan evokes his adventures netting dog-faced butterflies, hunting rattlesnakes, and watching fireflies mate. Inspired by regional flora and fauna, Sullivan ventures throughout the metropolis and its environs in search of sludge worms, gyrfalcons, and wild onions. In reporting his findings to otherwise oblivious urbanites, Sullivan endeavors to make “alienated, atomized, postmodern people feel at home, connected to something beyond ourselves.“
In the sprawling Chicagoland region, where an urban ecosystem teeming with remarkable life evolves between skyscrapers and train tracks, no writer chronicled the delicate balance of nature and industry more vividly than Jerry Sullivan. An homage to the urban ecology Sullivan loved so dearly, Hunting for Frogs on Elston is his fitting legacy as well as a lasting gift to the urban naturalist in us all.
What brings me to this post is a particular column he wrote for the May 30th, 1991 edition of the Reader. In the article, he documents a field trip he took to Pit 11 with the Field Museum. I remember the Field Museum trips. I never took one to Pit 11, but did manage to visit the Elmer Larson Quarry near DeKalb, IL. on a few occasions to collect Silurian fossils. Dave Dolak guided many of these trips. I think there was even a bus trip to southern Indiana to visit the famous Route 1 road cut.
Often, the Field Museum would take a bus to an area called ESCONI Hill, which unfortunately is pretty overgrown now. Back in the day, it probably looked something like this.
Ralph Jewell on the Fossil Forum
Unfortunately, it was raining on the day of his trip. Oh, for a chance to collect the bare slopes of the Pit 11 he describes!
What I needed was a mentor. Starting my first-ever fossil hunt, I was wandering without coherent aim, staring at the muddy ground with a hopeless expression. Wanting this to be easy, certain that it would be very hard, I felt like a man looking behind the bureau for his car keys when he knows perfectly well he left them locked in the car. If you want to find fossils, I thought, attach yourself to somebody who knows how to look for them. There must be a technique, a knack, a secret that separates the adept from the ignorant.
Did I mention that it was raining? Very hard, in fact. When it rains, the bare earth on the steep slopes of piles of strip-mine spoils gets very slippery. But the bare slopes are where the action is, because there is nothing green and leafy to block your view of the fossils.
The bare slopes were striated with parallel gullies running almost straight up and down. The rain continued to fall, and the gullies became rushing streams. The waters were gray, colored by the sand and clay suspended in them. The eroded beds of these tiny, precipitous streams were where the most rocks would be exposed, and the fossils were all inside rocks.
There is a summary of the history of the area and of fossil collecting the spoil piles.
We were digging in mounds of strip-mine debris because these heaps of earth and rock are part of Mazon Creek, one of the premier fossil beds in the world. Three hundred million years ago, in the Pennsylvanian Era, the area around the towns of Braidwood, Morris, Coal City, and Essex was the edge of a river delta. The river drained lands to the north and east, and it met the sea around Braidwood. Coal formed in the coastal swamps of that delta. Silt in the ancient river flowed over the delta and out to sea. The deepening silt buried the bodies of plants and animals, buried them so soon after death that even the outlines of the soft parts of their bodies are now visible. Since the Pennsylvanian Era, the geology of northeastern Illinois has been peaceful enough to leave the delicate fossils undisturbed.
To paleontologists, the Mazon Creek fossil beds take in about 70 square miles in Will, Grundy, and Kankakee counties. The name comes from the fact that the first fossils were discovered in small bedrock outcrops along Mazon Creek (or Mazon River on contemporary maps). There weren’t many such outcrops. Most of the bedrock is buried under a deep layer of glacial debris, so it wasn’t until coal mining began around Mazon Creek that the richness of the fossil life came to be appreciated.
Coal miners sank shafts through the glacial stuff and then through a layer of soft, dark rock called the Francis Creek shale. This late Pennsylvanian shale lies directly over the coal beds, so when the first mines were dug at Braidwood, Illinois, in 1855 and in nearby Coal City in 1858, the miners pulled large piles of shale up to the surface and heaped them around the pitheads.
Local fossil collectors combed through the heaps of rock and dirt and then passed their findings along to the professional paleontologists, who published as quickly as possible. The first academic paper on Mazon Creek fossils appeared in 1864. Since then all sorts of distinguished scientists, including Edward Drinker Cope, one of the founding lunatic geniuses of paleontology in America, have published hundreds of papers on the Mazon Creek fossils. To date, about 325 species of animals and perhaps 350 species of plants have been found in Mazon Creek sites.
They have been found inside concretions, rocks that formed around the fresh dead bodies of 300 million years ago. The concretions are made of siderite, a combination of iron and carbonates that produces a reddish brown rock with a rather gritty texture. Concretions are usually flattened disks or ovals with rounded edges. They may be an inch long, or they may be a foot long.
Jerry does a good job describing the science as it was known in 1991. Although, he missed it on the name of the Tully Monster. This was just a few years after the Tully Monster was named the State Fossil of Illinois. The gregarium in Tullimonstrum gregarium actually means common.
The discoveries are extraordinary. Jellyfish are rarely found in the fossil record. In Mazon Creek there are not only two species but also hundreds of specimens of each. Mazon Creek also gave us the world’s oldest isopod fossil. Isopods are small crustaceans that are still with us today. The world’s oldest squid came from there, and the only known fossil lamprey. Other soft animals that are beautifully preserved include worms, sea cucumbers, and larval fish.
The most famous of Mazon Creek’s fossils is the Tully monster, a wormlike creature of, as they say in the journals, uncertain affinities. The first fossil of Tullimonstrum gregarium was pulled from Pit 11 about 30 years ago by Francis J. Tully, a local man who was into fossil collecting as a hobby. He took his find to Dr. Eugene Richardson at the Field Museum, and Richardson published a description in 1966, naming the fossil in honor of its discoverer.
A Tully monster could be as much as 14 inches long. It has a flattened tail and a long proboscis carrying teethlike projections. It has been shoehorned into various phyla since its discovery. Lately it is being proposed as an ancestor to the vertebrates, and it will probably be proposed as a lot of other things in the future. For the moment, it may be officially placed among the Problematica.
The second word in the Tully monster’s scientific name is revealing. The Tully monster is gregarious. It likes to hang out with the other monsters. We can believe this because hundreds of fossils of this unique creature have been found in Pit 11. There were whole schools of monsters in these waters in the Pennsylvanian Era, and parts of many of them were preserved in the amazing Francis Creek shale.
He did collect some concretions. I wonder what became of them... did they open up via freeze/thaw or did they succumb to the hammer to reveal their secrets?
I certainly have a fine collection of concretions from my collecting trip. However, I don’t know for certain that they have fossils in them. You can stand a concretion on edge and bang it with a hammer. If it is ready to split, it will split along the plane of weakness created by the fossil. So you bang a couple of times, but if it shows no signs of splitting you stop hammering. Further beating will just crush the whole rock.
To open the strong rocks–like all of those I collected–you need cycles of freezing and thawing, of water seeping into cracks in the rock and freezing. The sudden expansion widens the crack. After the next thaw water seeps into the wider crack and then freezes and expands again.
This is God’s way of breaking rocks, but he doesn’t have any deadlines. I am trying to speed up the process. I tossed my collected rocks in a bowl of water and froze them. Once they were solid, I took them out and thawed them. And then froze them again. Someday I will find out if I have a sea worm, a fern leaf, or a species of shrimp utterly new to science. It has been known to take two years to pop a rock even with accelerated freezing and thawing. In paleontology, you have to be patient.
All in all, it's a great article! Check it out if you get a chance!
The speaker at our December 3, 2021 meeting will be Scott Elrick, Head of the Coal, Bedrock and Industrial Minerals Section of ISGS. The topic of his talk via Zoom will be paleoecology of the Herrin Coal roof shales including depositional environment and climate. This talk should should add context to the fossil flora found at the Danville shale pile.
A story about Scott and the discovery of a large underground coal forest in the Smithsonian Magazine from 2009.
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Finding a fossil in a coal mine is no big deal. Coal deposits, after all, are petrified peat swamps, and peat is made from decaying plants, which leave their imprints in mud and clay as it hardens into shale stone.
But it was a different thing entirely when John Nelson and Scott Elrick, geologists with the Illinois State Geological Survey, examined the Riola and Vermilion Grove coal mines in eastern Illinois. Etched into ceilings of the mine shafts is the largest intact fossil forest ever seen—at least four square miles of tropical wilderness preserved 307 million years ago. That's when an earthquake suddenly lowered the swamp 15 to 30 feet and mud and sand rushed in, covering everything with sediment and killing trees and other plants. "It must have happened in a matter of weeks," says Elrick. "What we see here is the death of a peat swamp, a moment in geologic time frozen by an accident of nature."
To see this little-known wonder, I joined Nelson and Elrick at the Vermilion Grove site, a working mine operated by St. Louis-based Peabody Energy and closed to the public. I donned a hard hat, a light, gloves and steel-toed boots. I received an oxygen bottle and a safety lecture. In case of emergency—poison gas, fire or an explosion—follow the red lights to find the way out of the mine, safety manager Mike Middlemas counseled. We could encounter "thick black smoke, and you won't be able to see anything in front of you." He said to use the lifeline running along the ceiling, a slender rope threaded through wooden cones, like floats in a swimming pool.
Time: Dec 3, 2021 07:30 PM Central Time (US and Canada), join early to commiserate before the holidays.
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