My family and I went to the Strasburg Museum in Strasburg, Virginia, last fall, because (1) we’ve lived out here for two and a half years now without stopping in, and we felt “overdue” for checking it out, and (2) a big train is prominently featured out front, and my son is really keen on trains right now due to the “Thomas the Tank Engine” series of books. I don’t have much to report about the museum, but they do have a couple of fossils, and so I figured it was my duty as a geoblogger to document them and share them with the world.
Fossil trilobite pygidium (“tail plate”):
(About 1 inch or 2.5 cm across)
Callipygean pygidium.
Great picture.
Cool trilobectomy here….puts the bite in trilobite….http://www.steinkern.de/praeparation-und-bergung/trilobiten/1025-praeparation-und-rekonstruktion-einer-koneprusia-sp-aus-dem-devon-von-marokko.html
I donated small, silicified trilobite parts from the Edinburg formation (Sandian Stage, Upper Ordovician) to the Strasburg Museum back in 1974. The road cuts at Tumbling Run and at I-81 where US 11 passes overhead are thick with several types of silicified or otherwise-replaced fossil shells and exoskeletal parts that can be etched out of the rock. There are many other localities around Strasburg, although some have been set off by “No Trespassing” signs. Whittington and Evitt wrote up some of the silicified trilobite fauna in 1954, and Whittington produced two more big papers in 1956 and 1959. Byron Cooper also described some genera and species in 1953, operating out of Virginia Tech. The Otarionid genus and species Strasburgaspis cona was described by another paleontologist in the JP circa April 2005. I continue to visit Strasburg to collect from Houston but only after a hard freeze kills all the ticks. See Virginia Minerals (August 1960) for a popular account by Whittington of the trilobites in a typo-ridden article. The age of the fossils was given as 350 million years, which must have been a typo. Interestingly, Whittington agonizes over why some of the Virginia fossils look so much like species from Estonia and Scotland, but plate tectonics and continental drift were still about five or six years from acceptance.