COAL - Show Premieres Tonight

Tonight (March 30, 2011) at 10 PM EST, a show premieres on Spike TV called Coal.  It will show the internal workings of the Cobalt Coal Company, its 600 feet deep mine, and the miners who extract coal there.  The mine is located at Westchester Mountain in McDowell County, West Virginia, USA.  The mine obtains its coal from the Sewell Seam.  Coal obtained at the mine is used in the steel making industry with the "metallurgical" grade being used for coke production.

Watching the preview, one gets to see a lot of the internals of the mine and some nice computer graphic sequences showing the mine operations. 

Coal First Look – The First 14 Minutes Of The Series Premiere
Tags: Coal First Look – The First 14 Minutes Of The Series Premiere

A lot of preview videos are available on the Spike TV web site CLICK LINK HERE

Learn more at the Cobalt Coal web site CLICK LINK HERE

Visitors to Louisville, Kentucky can check out an informative coal display at the Louisville Science Center.

Tentaculites with Devonochonetes

Presented for your visual inspection, a Devonian hash plate from the Silver Creek Limestone of Clark County Indiana.  An intact Tentaculites with a lot of Devonochonetes brachiopods.

The Tentaculites is an extinct molluscs that lived in the Devonian and Silurian.  The ringed cone like shell is known as a conch.  Study of Devonian pyrite specimens from Germany alludes to the creature having tentacles.   So maybe they were like miniature shelled squids.  The next image shows the Tentaculites being about 1 cm in length.

Learn more about Tentaculitoids in the 1996 book Fossils of Ohio, Chapter 20 (pp.282-287) written by Stig M. Bergström.

This fossil is available for purchase on eBay CLICK LINK HERE.

On one side of this limestone block, is a cross section of a brachiopod with calcite crystals.

On the bottom of the plate are more remains of brachiopods plus this pygidium of a trilobite.  More that like it belonged to a Phacops.

View of top of plate:

View of bottom of plate:

View of one of the sides:

Plumulina "Mystery Animal" Fossil

This fossil appears to be a plant stalk but is in fact a marine animal.  It is called the Plumulina plumaria of the Upper Devonian Period (approximately 380 million years ago). The fossil is on display at the New York State Museum in Albany, New York.  Researchers determined this was not a plant because remnants of proteins were found and not cellulose.

The museum display shows that this animal first appeared in the Hamilton Sea.  It is similar to modern colonial soft corals and hydrozoans.

Fossil was found the Ithaca Formation of Tompkins County, New York.

Thanks to Kenny for the picture and description.