Working away in Slovenia!

So after a bit of a gap, the next few blog posts will come thick and fast! When you're away doing field work time is at a premium, so rarely do you get a free day (today, however, is one of those "time to sit down and get myself together" days).

So just pretend today is ~ 5 days ago.

Over the last few days we have been doing a lot of "exploratory research". Basically myself and local expert Adrijan have been hunting around for sites with good fossils. Sometimes we find a great site and can get to work right away....

I'm looking for fossils!

Jason is helping me measure bed thicknesses.

Other times, it can take a while to even FIND the outcrop! Sometimes the outcrop is ok, but we'd need a forest fire to see most of the section...

And then occasionally, there are just a few karst rocks in a field...

But all in all it has been good, there are a lot of open questions here in Slovenia, and the locals are extremely friendly! The Jurassic fossils (when we can find them) are great too!

Here's some awesome lithiotid bivalves!

These ones look a bit odd because rather than building a reef or bivalve pavement, they are filling an underwater channel that was eroded. Essentially they are acting like pebbles in a river! Shame about the tagging...

There are of course some beautiful branching coral colonies

For the Carbonate buffs that are bored with fossils, there are also some beautiful ooids here!

All in all, a really great place to see some lovely rocks!