Louisville Fossils and Beyond: Sep 2, 2020

Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Digging The Past Event

Saturday, August 29, 2020 The Falls of the Ohio State Park held their Digging the Past event. It has been several years since I had last attended back in 2015. In the past I always enjoyed identifying what people found in the collecting piles and elaborating about the minerals or fossils. The downside is the place to do this was at the cleaning screens and by the end of my shift I was quite wet and sometimes muddy.

This year everyone was in masks and social distanced so I only identified a couple of things. I volunteered to give a talk about fossil collecting but ending up talking to 2 people. While I was there I would estimate at least 100 people visited. Most of my time was spent speaking with exhibitors, helping with fundraising by selling fossil/mineral egg cartons or working around the presentation area.

At the end I went in the collecting area which was really muddy and my Estwing rock hammer split apart large pieces of Waldron Shale. It was almost impossible to find fossils in the muddy shale. Splitting the rocks helped in that I found several Eucalyptocrinus crinoid holdfasts, Metopolichas breviceps trilobite cephalon and Dalmanites pygidium.

Outside of the rocks, I found a small Stegerhynchus brachiopod and Platyostoma gastropod. The crowds would have probably been larger if no Covid epidemic and the weather being overcast with it looking like it was going to rain most of the morning. It was nice to be back and I got some exercise walking along the river front and breaking rocks.