A Good Reason to Join Dry Dredgers

Dry Dredgers is a geology society in Cincinnati, Ohio that was formed in 1942. They have a really nice website packed with images and fossil information. That area of Ohio must be primarily Ordovician.

Here is a set of photos they have posted about a 2009 field trip:

http://www.drydredgers.org/trip200903p1.htm

Wow, they collected some nice fossils and that looked like quite a turn out. I am not sure what a lot of them are but I saw some Cryptolithus trilobite pieces, castings of orthoceras cephalopods, gastropod molds and shells, crinoid stems, Isotelus feeding scoop, part of Flexicalymene trilobite, trace fossils, worm shells, branching bryozoans, tentaculites, brachiopods, and aragonite pelecypod shell.

A Coral Mixture

This rock fragment has been sitting out on the wash screen for a while. The spring rains have cleaned it off to reveal a number of corals. I thought this piece was maybe a fragment (6 cm by 5 cm) of a Silurian Alveolites coral.

One side of it has a colony of small Coenites reticulata branching corals. The small colony is about 5 cm by 3 cm in size. It is interesting in that the branches on the left of this picture are eroded out showing the whole fossil out of matrix.


This next picture shows a closer view of that branch.

Here is a side view of the layers of Alveolites.

On the other side of the coral fossil is another colony. It appears to be a Devonian Aulocystis coral. It is small and measures 2 cm in length and about 1 cm in width. It is like a series of little horns connected end to end.

This is a side view of the Aulocystis coral.

Here the Aulocystis colony can be seen from a distance. Above it is remanents of another coral maybe a larger Aulocystis. They are all growing on maybe the remains of an Alveolites coral.

This looks like some biodiversity going on in this specimen but I must have some identifications wrong since two different time period fossils could not be this close together. It does appear that there are at least 3 different coral fossils represented. I am guessing they will all turn out to be Silurian after some research.

Maybe A Devonian Favosites Coral

This is a series of photo of a possible Favosites colonial coral from the Devonian Period. I find it interesting in that has a lot of brown colored rock and then on off white component as well.

Specimen was found in Louisville Kentucky in a Devonian fossil layer.