More images for you today from my field trip a few weeks ago to West Virginia’s bizarro highway Corridor H, a quiet place built for roaring traffic. Its multistory roadcuts are fresh and profound; they offer the most incredible views into the mid-to-late-Paleozoic surface of Earth… and the creatures that lived there.
In the Devonian period, the Helderberg Group of limestones was deposited. It’s full of interesting fossils, the remains or traces of ancient lifeforms:
Here’s a solitary coral:
And now, a slab of thinly veiled crinoid columnals:
And lastly, a suite of ostracodes, odd arthropods (relatives of crabs and ants and trilobites and scorpions) with a clam-like shell enclosing their leggy bodies. They look like beans:
is that cleavage refraction in the first photo? awesome
Was this near Baker? Can you give any more location information, as I will be taking my family of avid fossil collectors to the area at Thanksgiving!
Thanks!
Barbara
I don’t think so – there are fossils on the eastbound exit ramp near Baker, but those are in Mahantango Formation shales / siltstones. These are in slightly older limestones; I don’t remember offhand from which outcrop – there’s a big clifflike roadcut just east of Baker that has Helderberg; it would be a good place to try looking.