New Field Assistant

In April my student, Kelly, and I went out to Arizona to start her MSc project. Kelly is working on a Cretaceous coral-algal-rudist reef in Arizona...

and we took out a new field assistant to help us map the outcrop!

Kelly is a great pilot and took some great shots of the rocks!

Droning aside, this is a pretty awesome reef! There were lots of great corals...

 

... as well as some really amazing rudists!

Sometimes there are even corals and rudists together!

Kelly will also be tackling this very interesting facies with algae/microbes/stromatolites, corals, and carbonate sediments! Microdigitate stromatolites on a coral!

In addition, there were some textbook borings in one of the corals!

We also found a couple of nice ammonites...

...and some forams.

Panorama!

And some gratuitous shots of the area because it was very pretty (although I could do with 50% less spiky plants!)

Yay fieldwork!

Undergraduate Field Trip

Today a bunch of us went around Austin looking for Austin Group fossils! We had a great time and collected a lot of beautiful specimens. I think this was possibly the most enthusiastic group of undergrads I have had in the field, and that made losing a day of my weekend much more tolerable :)

Outcrop #1, Little Walnut Creek: Great oysters!

Inoceramids = giant bivalves

Outcrop #2, Shoal Creek: We didn't find as many sharks teeth as we had hoped.

but.. this guy is a ray tooth

Outcrop #3, Bee Caves: Will shows students how to find echinoids!

A fun bench with lots of great stuff

Outcrop #4, a secret location.
Last outcrop was less prolific than I had hoped, but we found loads of gastropods, bivalves and a few echinoids.

Great Group!

Obligatory Hook 'em pose!

And my favorite shot of the day!

Fossils around Austin

This past weekend we went fossil hunting with UT Professor Emeritus Jim Sprinkle! We visited several spots with outcrops of the Cretaceous Austin Chalk (although this was the most picturesque)

Jim was awesome, he really knows his local fossils!

We were all hunting for the best specimens!

Check out the spoils!

A beautiful oyster with original coloration, this is Exogyra tigris (tiger striped Exogyra)!

Another oyster bored by sponges (Exogyra ponderosa)

Some weird and wonderful serpulid worm burrows!

A host of steinkerns, casts, and molds (brachiopod on left, gastropods on right)!




The echinoids were my favorite though, I never find these in the field! Here's a very pretty regular echinoid (Salenia texana)

And a big beefy irregular echinoid (Heteraster obliquatus)

Oh, and a wee little shark tooth!