This is Mazon Monday post #209. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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Today, we have another post about the "Richardson's Guide to the Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek". This one addresses the amazing spider on the book's jacket. That beautiful specimen was generously donated to the Mazon Creek Project by Rita and Walter Lietz. The fossil was referred to as "Walter's Spider" for many years by their friends and fellow collectors. Both Rita and Walter were very generous with their fossils. They made numerous donations to the Mazon Creek Project and other academic institutions and were always ready to loan or donate a special specimen, as seen in "Fossil Insect Symposium" (Mazon Monday #172).
The text below is from the book's Preface.
In general, specimens for the book were chosen by the chapter authors, and nearly all are housed in museum or university collections. The specimen numbers include a prefix indicating the source collection (a key to the abbreviations follows Appendix C). In cases where the specimens were in private collections, we encouraged the collectors to donate the specimens to a museum or institution of their choice. A number of fossils made their way into institutional collections this way. For example, the spider on the book cover was kindly donated to Northeastern Illinois University by Rita and Walter Lietz.
We've done a few posts that mentioned Rita and Walter. Ralph Jewell has multiple informative posts about them on the Fossil Forum. He's posted about their collection about his memories collecting with his "fossil mentor". Here's Ralph's story of Walter from the Fossil Forum.
I always liked rocks and fossils but did not know where to collect them. I lived about 7 blocks from North Eastern University, which is where the Mazon Creek Project was and I never knew it until I was going there later on. I also stopped at Dave’s Rock Shop in Evanston about 30 years ago and asked if there was anywhere to collect fossils in Illinois and I was told about Braidwood, but they also advised me that it was closed to collecting- which was not true.
Finally years later, I asked people at work if they knew anything place to collect fossils and I mentioned the Braidwood area. I got a call from a co-worker who told me about Fossil Rock Campground, but did not know anything else about it. So one Saturday I called 411 - (pre-internet days) and I asked for their number. I then called the number that I was given and it turned out to be the Fossil Ridge Library in Braidwood. Now under normal circumstances I would have apologized and hung up, but for some reason I did not. I told the woman my predicament with fossils and she gave me the phone number to a person she referred to as their “ Resident Expert”- Walter Lietz. I called this older gentleman and he invited me and my family to his house in Wilmington. We were surprised because we are from Chicago and that was something that you did not do. We went down and thus started my love of Mazon Creek fossils. Walter was about 40-50 years older than me and had a vast collection of Mazon Creek fossils. His spider is on the cover of Richardson’s Guide to Mazon Creek Fauna. He donated it to the Mazon Creek Project along with hundreds of other fantastic fossils. Walter use to collect with Francis Tully and they would go to the Field Museum on the weekends and bring unknown fossils to Dr. Eugene Richardson so he could ID them. He was such a great guy to me and my son and we remained friends until his death. I use to go and keep an eye on him when his wife went out shopping, he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and I would play videos of trips that he and I did for the Braidwood Library (Pit 11) or Shadow Lakes residents (Pit 4). He also had binders of correspondence from professors from all over the world regarding Mazon Creek fossils. A favorite of his was Jarmilla Peck from Carleton University -Ottawa (Paleoentomologist). She would come to his house and look at insects that he had. She was a very nice woman and would send him drawings of some of his fossils. These binders of Walter’s were a great wealth of information and one day I called his wife after he had passed to see how she was doing, I would still visit her after his death, and she told me that she had a great big bonfire going. I asked her what she was doing and she stated that she was burning the stuff in the binders because she was going to give the binders to the church and asked if I needed an empty binder. I told her that I would have taken all of that stuff to save and she stated that she did not think I wanted it, I should have talked up earlier. I credit Walter and his wife Rita for my love of fossils, if I had been given the wrong number those many years ago I doubt that I would have ever discovered my true love of fossils.
Myself and others would give him our “cast offs” and he would use them for the grab bags that we gave to all participants that were on the Braidwood Library trip or the ones he and I would do inside Shadow Lakes. He would also take other grab bags and bigger specimens that he mounted on cardboard down to the Wilmington Historical Society and he would give them the proceeds as a donation and would always list the names of the collectors who contributed fossils. They went through a lot of fossils at the Historical Society since they were priced for next to nothing.
Photos of Walter and Rita collecting, maybe Pit 11.
The label for Walter's Spider says it was collected in May 1975 at a locality that was called "Goldblatts" by collectors, a reference to the old Goldblatts department store. Supposedly, they named it "Goldblatt's", because you could find anything there.
The truth is that Goldblatt's was the name of the farm where the locality was located. This photo of the area was used in 1939 as part of the Langfords' Christmas card.
The specimen was identified as Pleophrynus ensifer. P. ensifer was described in "Palaeozoic Arachnida of Illinois. An enquiry into their evolutionary trends. Illinois State Museum, Scientific Papers" by Alexander I. Petrunkevitch in 1945. George Langford includes a description, a photo (holotype), and some nice drawings in his second book "The Wilmington Coal Fauna and Additions to the Wilmington Coal Flora from a Pennsylvanian Deposit in Will County, Illinois".
Order TRIGONOTARBIA
Genus PLEOPHRYNUS Petrunkevitch
This genus was based on a species, P. ensifer, known from a single specimen in the Langford Collection at the Illinois State Museum. Petrunkevitch later (1949) removed the species to the older genus Eophrynus Woodward, suppressing the name Pleophrynus, but in the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology (1955) he returned it to Pleophrynus. His description of the genus in the Treatise reads in part: "Carapace triangular, longer than wide, acutely pointed in front, ornamented, with pair of eyes on tubercle situated behind middle. Abdomen with 6 rows of tubercles and 4 posterior spurs".
Pleophrynus ensifer Petrunkevitch
Figure 96. A specimen, in matching halves of a split concretion. The holotype, Illinois State Museum, No. 14873.
Figure 97. Petrunkevitch's drawings (1945) of dorsal and ventral aspects.
Figure 98. My restoration of this intricately sculptured species.
This specimen is the holotype, which resides at the Illinois State Museum.
These are original photos of the spider. The positive appeared on the cover of the Richardson's Guide.
Pat May stopped by the auction table at the 2024 ESCONI Show and showed us some casts he created from molds made from the original specimen.
Ralph Jewell with the casts.
Thanks go out Ralph Jewell and Charlies Shabica as some of the information and photos for this post came from them. Additionally, we'd like to thank Pat May for allowing us to use photos of his wonderful casts.
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