Swope Park FOSSILS

What a beautiful day! Even the bugs thought so; this ladybug enjoyed our 50+degrees at the fireman's memorial where I stopped for a bit of fossil hunting. He wasn't slow, either- the little thing sure didn't want to stop for a photo. He'll be something of a bug-cicle by tomorrow!
I started out on the lip of the second terrace, in between the black shale and edge of the rock where the best fossil-bearing limestone is exposed and eroding. Here, I found all sorts of bryozoa and shells. The wind blew my collection-bag over the edge and I jumped down to retrieve it. On the base of the memorial there are few fossils. Some cool iron deposits. I was lucky enough to come upon some odd calcite crystals and a patch of rainbow-coloured pyrite- the crystals of both minerals are small, though.
I returned to the lip of the bench for oodles of coral-like bryozoa skeletons, detailed shells and small crinoid parts. The trunk segments of the crinoids were most common, but I managed to gather some very cool spines and even a few parts of the flower-like head. Some of the shells I found show remarkable detail. Many are broken or fractured and still on the limestone matrix, but there were several today that were completely eroded from anything and still in fine condition- like they'd been taken from some shallow sea and placed on the bluff just for me!



I moved onto the next bench after an hour or so, where there were many handfuls of larger, clean-looking crinoid segments waiting in a thin, wet vein of soft material running at shoulder height. The vein runs the length of the memorial, but the echinoderms are so abundant in only the far 1/3. Here, also, there are few other fossils. the kinds of things that are found only about twenty feet below, on another terrace, are completely absent from this layer. All of those cool shells and coral-things are below. Crinoids are up on the higher level- and larger pieces are not uncommon!
I did manage to spot a very cool scallop-like shell fossil in the dormant vegetation. The coolest part of this matchbox-sized fossil is that is still shows some of the colour and patterns of the shell. I think that it was THE SCORE for the day!ABOVE are more of the common shells from the lower levels of the memorial. This beautiful trio has been only partially weathered from it's matrix- Such fossils are easy to collect here. I think that these are some kind of Meekella; the remains of one of dozens of species of Brachiopods existing in the deposits at the memorial. Found some cool shelf-type fungi on the the way out...