Pages

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Trip to Lake Cumberland

Back from Lake Cumberland, Kentucky where the boaters were celebrating the end of the summer holiday season with boat racing on the lake. It was quite a busy day on the lake to be studying the area geology and looking for fossils. At one point from my perch on a large boulder I counted over 70 boats in view. It was an interesting day in that I saw a number of coral pieces, bryozoans, numerous brachiopods, and even a small trilobite fragment fossil.

This first picture is of a common calyx found at the lake called Eretmocrinus. I like to think of it as a pineapple. One person in the group I was in found one of these out of the matrix with its long anal tube intact. Amazing that fossil stayed in one piece over the millions of years!


This next image is a panoramic image of the lake. The boats were moving closer to the shore to allow room for the racing boats. Notice the muddy water close to the shore line churned up by so much wave action from the fast boats.



This next image is of a fragment of what might be an Agaricocrinus or "mushroom crinoid".


This picture depicts a Cladochonus coral wrapped around an unidentified crinoid stem.


This picture shows a section of crinoid holdfast.

4 comments:

  1. Great panorama photo, did you take that as a single shot or mosaic a bunch of smaller ones? Very cool finds too, Maybe next year I'll make it down for the trip. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Shamalama,

    Welcome back from your vacation, I look forward to reading about it on Fossil Forum.

    The lake image was 7 pictures taken from a tripod I set up on a large boulder high on the lake shore. Photoshop was used to merge them together. If I could do it over, I would have adjusted the camera down some so all the shore line could have been seen in the image.

    We left from another dock this year to see some different geology. The area had a lot more brachiopods which I need to determine their names. More pictures to be posted soon.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I just found your blog as I'm doing some basic investigation of the Lake Cumberland fossils. This year was our 4th annual house boat vacation to the lake, and I'm intrigued by the numbers and types of fossils that I've seen at approx. 710' - 715' elevation, based on the indicated lake water levels at this (Sept) time of the year. Thanks for your pictures and descriptions ... I'm less than a novice at this.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice, I assume you were on the KPS field trip. You can visit the Mississippian fossil page crinoid section on the KYANA site http://www.kyanageo.org/mississippian.html to see more fossils found in past field trips made to the lake. Good luck identifying what you found.

    ReplyDelete