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No rain in the forecast for the workshop tomorrow. This is good, because the clayey soil becomes impossible to walk through if it's very wet. One ends up with huge clay boots. As it is, we can look forward to a day of discovery of many interesting fossils. And this is a site where almost every year somebody finds something truly remarkable, so we can hope for that too. In recent years we have found a pterosaur and a brittle star.

Fossil workshop yesterday

We had a great time collecting Cretaceous fossils in West central Alabama yesterday. About 20 of us went to a site on private land where the University of West Alabama is excavating vertebrate skeletons and other interesting fossils. Participants saw a sea turtle and two different kinds of large fish that were being protected and carefully removed from the matrix. They also got to pick through some fine gravel that contained fossil sharks teeth. This had been scooped up from a stream and brought to the workshop as lagniappe. All kinds of things were found in the Cretaceous chalk yesterday, but the pièce de résistance was an ophiuroid (a brittle star). This is an extremely rare find and will go into the Black Belt Museum.

We will do this again next fall. We are aiming to educate K-12 teachers, but if the workshop doesn't fill up we are open to anyone else. Most years, people who are not formal full-time teachers are able to go along and that was the case this year.

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A day in the Cretaceous


two brittle stars in death embrace
lost, 82,000,000 years;
found, they double what we know
still hidden from our minds--
whether descendants in their thousands writhe
in the abyss