Fossil Hunting!

Hi, it’s Eddie again. While on a quick trip to Santa Fe, Julia and I made a detour so that we could hunt for some fossils!  I had read online that north of Santa Fe, before you get to the national forest, there were some good places for hunting brachiopods and crinoids.  We didn’t have an enormous amount of time there, but we did find some pretty cool specimens.

One of the fossils we found was the above brachiopod.  It’s essentially an ancient clam.

Here’s the opposite cast of a different brachiopod.

Crinoids were a type of sea creature, related to the starfish, that had a long stalk for a body topped by something resembling a flower.  Finding parts of the stalk of the Crinoid is pretty common and two cross sections of the stalk are shown in the above picture.  We were pleased we found two segments that were so well preserved!

I believe that I found something resembling fossilized sea weed (the black lines above).  But looking at other pictures of fossilized sea plants online, mine is either really sad or not a fossil (but I still think it’s cool).

As you can see, we found quite a fossil rich area!  Having only done fossil hunting in Mississippi (quite good fossil hunting there), I was pleasantly surprised by the number of fossils in New Mexico.  Hopefully Julia and I will find a new batch of fossils soon!