This is Mazon Monday post #104. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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We recently received an interesting link from ESCONI member Kristi Overgaard of a post on the Geology World group on Facebook. The post was by James Anderson and it described an transaction with Dr. Wilbur Hoff's son. Dr. Hoff was a long time fossil hunter, who collected just about everything. He was instrumental in the founding of ESCONI way back in 1949. He served as President of ESCONI in 1959. Here he is with his wife, Donnafred in 1958.
Here he is presiding over the 10th Anniversary party.
And, here he is on a field trip to Galena, IL in 1959.
The post by James Anderson is interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, there's some amazing photos of specimens collected in the mid-1940's. Secondly, there is a letter that details the terms of the sale of "15 pair of fossil fern" for $3.25!!! Shipping for the order, which had to be fairly heavy given the size shown in the pictures, was $0.78 for express handling and $0.66 for parcel post from Chicago to Parkisons' Store in Percival, Iowa. Dr. Hoff was instructed to send a few "GOOD ONES"... Wow! Those would be considered GREAT ONES both then and now! It's nice to see they were "Returnable if not satisfied"...
MID-CENTURY MAZON CREEK. Collected from the mid-1930’s through 1950 by Wilbur Hoff of Illinois who started offering these for sale in 1944 according to a letter he kept on which he had written “1st order received 3/8/1944”. These unusually large nodules are seemingly no longer available for some time now from the waste piles of the coal mines in northern Illinois. Never saw anything like these the few times I collected there about 30 years ago. One of the unopened nodules is about 2 feet in length; another is 18 inches long and weighs more than 10 pounds.Prices have also changed a bit since he sold these through the want ads in the “Mineralogist” magazine which lists 5 to 7 inch long pairs for $1 to $3 and 4 to 5 inch pairs for 50 cents to $1 each. His first order was ridiculously inexpensive (15 pairs of nodules up to 8 inches for $3) as was the postage (78 cents for shipping 16 pounds). I acquired these in a large collection from his son who operated the small museum his father first started in Illinois then later moved to Arizona.The Mazon Creek fossil deposit extends over a wide area of northeastern Illinois. The fossils are best known from concretions or nodules of siderite, an iron carbonate mineral, which generally must be fractured to expose a plant or animal fossil within. These nodules occur in a geological unit known as the Francis Creek shale, a wedge-shaped body of gray shale that lies immediately above the Colchester (No. 2) coal bed in northeastern Illinois. The Francis Creek shale is of Middle Pennsylvanian age, approximately 309 million years old. The majority of the coal mines were closed and back-filled during the 1990s. Because of this, collecting localities are greatly diminished, especially the largest, Pit 11, which was deliberately flooded to create a fishing reserve and cooling lake for a nuclear power station. And owing to the flat topography of Illinois, very few natural exposures exist; the banks of the Mazon River reveal some outcrops; however, high river discharge, vegetation overgrowth and land ownership make collecting today very problematic. (Journal of the Geological Society (2019) 176 (1): 1–11.)
Fossil Photos