Looking at Ordovician carbonates in Germany Valley, West Virginia, a few weeks ago on Rick Diecchio’s GMU sedimentology and stratigraphy course field trip: Lots and lots of brachiopods… Crinoid columnals mized with brachiopods: A set of coarsely-infilled trace fossils: Crinoid stem: Nice strophomenid brachiopod: Bryozoan? Receptaculid?
Recently, I posted about an excellent road cut in Fort Valley showing well-developed 10 cm+ Zoophycos trace fossils. Presented here are three new GigaPan images (two outcrop; one macro) of Zoophycos from the Devonian-aged Mahantango Formation: [gigapan id=”170978″] link [gigapan id=”170977″] link [gigapan id=”170875″] link These images are part of a new “virtual field trip” … Read more
A report from the field: new outcrops of Ordovician-aged turbidites featuring geopetal indicators, fossil content, and a structural overprint imparted during Pangaea’s assembly.
A morning’s field trip yields an outcrop of excellent Zoophycos trace fossils in southern Fort Valley, Virginia.
At the Spiral Tunnels overlook on the Trans-Canada Highway, you can look at trains. Or, you can check out some lovely trace fossils in boulders which divide the viewing area from the highway: These are in the Gog Formation, a Cambrian-aged quartz arenite, mostly fused to quartzite nowadays… I know which subject I would choose … Read more
Some boulders seen on the trail to Helen Lake sported lovely sets of Skolithos trace fossils. Here are two boulders, with the perspective on the tubular paleo-vertical Skolithos burrows being “map view”: Another boulder, in the middle of the trail, showed them in a fine cross-sectional view: (click to enlarge substantially) It also included some … Read more
Look at this! A whole boulder made of trace fossils. Three photos, each more progressively zoomed in than the last. Update: The @ichnologist identifies these as perhaps Thalassinoides.
For those inclined toward trace fossils… …This is from Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. I saw it on the trail to Consolation Lakes from Moraine Lake. I do not recall rock type – could be dolostone, could be Gog quartzite. It’s float (loose; not in situ), but I infer the photographed surface is the underside … Read more
Good morning. Here are two images from last March’s “Border to Beltway” field trip to West Texas, on the north flanks of the Cristo Rey laccolith. Specifically, these are Cretaceous strata of the Anapra Sandstone, looking at the bedding plane of the rocks. Cutting across bedding are a series of fractures (joints) that have been … Read more
Good morning! Let’s take a walk up the east side of the Franklin Mountains, north of El Paso, Texas, to walk across the Great Unconformity. The basement rock exposed here is the Red Bluff Granite, a 1.1 Ga felsic magma that intruded the columnar basalts of the Mundy “Breccia” and the Castner Marble. (It is … Read more