June 21 and Fossil Hunting

 

 

 

I don't even know where to start with this one

Last weekend was Father's Day here and we spent the weekend at our daughter and son-in-law's cottage up north.   Now, if you're from Michigan you have the advantage of having a map of the state in our hand.  Michigan is shaped like a mitten so when we  tell someone where we live or where we  vacationed or went to college or whatever we hold up our hand and point to the  general location.  OK, for this, hold up your left hand with the  palm showing outward.  

The cottage is just above the knuckle on your ring finger.  The little finger and ring finger  are preferred, premier vacation locations here. Spread those  two fingers apart a bit and you create some of the most beautiful  bays.  

SIL is a geologist.   He wanted to go drumlin hunting.  That means he was looking for the landforms the glaciers left hundreds of millions of years ago.  These two fingers are prime drumlin locations for Michigan.  The weekend before he took the family and  found a prime location for these land forms clearly  cut in half for the highway and in the distance planted now with cherry trees.  Where the drumlins were cut through you can clearly see it if you understand what you're seeing.  I sure do now.

So, the other thing about this area in the state is it's a prime location for finding Petoskey stones.  These stones are fossilized coral from when Michigan wasn't even IN Michigan hundreds of millions ago.  The glaciers, the pressure, the life forms, all contributed to fossilizing these coral into stones. They are from the Devonian period, considered the Age of Fishes  because everything was pretty much just fish and coral and the first seed bearing plants where there was land and  ammonites, trilobites, brachiopods populated the coral reefs.  Today you can find people walking bent in half along along Lake Michigan's shoreline hunting for Petoskey stones in the water.  They're easy to SEE in the water because you can see the design but they aren't easy to FIND.  You will pay a lot in gift shops for one because they are Michigan's State Stone. Everybody wants one to take home with them and  bragging rights that they found them on the shore.  I sent one to Jenny's grand daughter once.

Well, a weekend ago as SIL, daughter and both grand and their friends got out of the car along the side of the road and wandered up the hill of the cut in half drumlin they were finding Petoskey stones the size of your hand and bigger and smaller  all over the place. They were finding them on what used to be Devonian time shores.  Ancient.  And, holy cow, other fossils, too.  It was, to his eye, like picking up confetti.  

So, Saturday he took PH and I  along and we hunted, too.

                        Honestly, they were just laying there on this exposed cut of the drumlin calling out.

                                                           You can see the steepness.

Adelaide found  one lying on the ground but  the more she dug the bigger the fossil got and she finally had to call her dad over to help.  She had the find of the day.  It was huge and after we washed it off at home we saw  how big the coral area was plus the number of  other fossils stuck in this ancient piece of mud.

                                                                         Even I  found some!! 

 PH had his hands full, we all did.  You can see, we just pulled off the highway along the side of the road and started picking up fossils.  PH rivaled Adelaide for the find of the day. He found, and I still don't know how he knew to pick it up, a fossilized wave. When I looked at it I just saw a stone. But SIL was so excited  and showed us what to look at and, yup, there is was, a wave. A stone wave. A wave turned to stone.

I'm not going to show lots of  photos of our finds because honestly, they look like rocks until your eye "sees" it.  Elizabeth has the eye.  She just sees them and other  fossils. Mom had to use all of her names to call her down from the top of the hill when it was time to go.  For her it was like picking up candy from the street during a parade. Trick or Treating without the trick.

                                        This was Adelaide's huge rock after it was rinsed off at home.

At the upper left you can clearly see the  coral that we call Petoskey Stone .

                          Toward the bottom the other corals and semi-shelled critters fossilized.

SIL showed me how to polish the stone with four different grades of sand papers and here he is polishing it at the end with felt and polish.

         To get to this.  I can't even tell you what you'd pay in a shop for a Petoskey Stone this size.   

When we left the drumlin we went to a lakeside park and sure enough, there were people bent in half walking the shore searching for what we had  buckets full of in the trunk of the car. 

I've always said when you go to the beach with  Son in Law you don't sit on a blanket with a book.  

You learn.