This is Throwback Thursday #222. 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!
This was originally posted as part of the run up 70th Anniversary as Flashback Friday #7. We are now in the midst of our 75th Anniversary.
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Photo from a 2008 ESCONI field trip
Lone Star Quarry in Oglesby, IL was always a popular field trip site. It has a rich deposit of marine fossils. The site is about the same age as Mazon Creek, late Pennsylvanian, but had a marine, deep water setting. ESCONI held multiple trips there each year in the 1990s and 2000s. Shark teeth, sponges, cephalopods, crinoids, trilobites, and lots and lots of brachiopods were could found there. You could take a snow shovel and fill up buckets with the little Composita brachiopods.
The quarry was purchased by the State of Illinois a few years ago and will be made into a fossil park in the future.
On June 4th, 2000, Matthew Galloway found an amphibian bone on an ESCONI field trip to Lone Star. The followling story was posted to the ESCONI website in 2000. What a find!
Matthew(10 years old) and Barrett Galloway(14 years old) with their fossils at the Sept. 16, 2000 ESCONI Show and Tell. Matthew is holding a tetrapod bone found June 4 at the Lone Star Quarry. Barrett is holding a pavement tooth of a shellcrusher shark embedded in limestone found September 4 at Illinois Cement Quarry.
Matthew Galloway's Exciting Discovery
Call it beginner’s luck. A ten (10) year old LaMoille boy was excited about going on his first field trip with the Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI), then he made an exciting discovery.
"I joined the club because I wanted to go on field trips with people who know more than I do" said Matthew Galloway, who has been collecting fossils since he was six (6).
During that first field trip with the club, he spotted a bone embedded in stone which turned out to be the most significant specimen found by 38 people searching for fossils in a LaSalle County quarry on June 4.
"This is the best thing I have found" said Matthew. The club’s field trip coordinator, Bealis Giddings of Mazon, told Matthew and Bruce Galloway the fossils was a leg bone from an amphibian known as a tetrapod.
Giddings has searched for fossils in upper Illinois River Valley quarries for ten (10) years.
"This is the biggest one I have seen. It is at least six times bigger than any I had seen," Giddings said.
Everyone involved in the field trip expressed appreciation to the quarry owners for giving them permission to look for fossils.
Bruce Galloway brought the fossil to the attention of Michael Philips, a geology instructor at Illinois Valley Community in Oglesby who took digital pictures of the fossil. He confirmed that the Galloways had found a tetrapod (a four-legged animal that looks like a mud puppy) from the Pennsylvanian Age (286-320 million years ago).
Philips e-mailed photos of the bone to Russ Jacobson, a geologist and paleontologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey in Champaign. "It is a nice specimen of a lower limb bone of a tetrapod", Jacobson said. "It may not tell us much about the species, but it is a record of another one".
For further information, click on Mike Phillips: Amphibian Leg Bone Fossil
(http://www2.ivcc.edu/phillips/fossil/amphibian/amphibian.html)
