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.

Horn Coral Zaphrentis phrygia

Middle Devonian Period horn corals called Zaphrentis phrygia. This one was found in New York state.

These last set of horn corals were found in Ohio, probably in Columbus Limestone which is from the Devonian Period.

Ichthyosaur Fossil

This first image is one of my favorites I took at the museum because it is a composite image of four pictures. It was taken on the first level which contains the vertebrate fossils of Muséum National D'Historie Naturelle Jardin Des Plantes Paléontologie et Anatomie Comparée in Paris, France.

It appears to be a marine reptile from the Jurassic Period called Ichthyosaur. I did not photograph its label. The glare from the skylights were making parts of the museum floor hard to photograph.

The second picture is of the case taken at an angle to try to avoid some of the glare.