Tucson Mountains and the one that almost got away....
Why is it that the image of the best fossil I find in any given locality turns out blurry? It must be the camera, and not my technique. At any rate, on a recent trip to the Tucson Mountains, we encountered a nice outcrop containing thousands of mixed broken bivavle shells. This layer can be found in several locations in the Tucson Mountains, but is seldom traceable for more than a few hundred feet. In amongst the coquinoidal limestone was a nice plant stem. I managed to get several fair images of the limestone, but all of the plant stem images were somewhat blured. I fixed the best image up as best I could and posted it here. This location is inside Tucson Mountain Park, and is a "No Collect" area. I guess I'll be forced to make another trip.  We also stopped by a local outcrop of Horquilla Limestone and photographed a typical assemblage of Pennsylvanian age invertebrates. You can see all of the images here.

Finally, time for an update....

I finally found the time to update the "updates" page. We recently spent some time near Parker Canyon Lake, and photographed a few nice rudists in the Mural Limestone outcrops in the huachuka mountains. These Worm Burrows are nice as well.

 

 

 

See all of the recent shots on our updates page.

 Happy Trails,

Walt

Oracle Trip August 2010

We recently visited the Oracle area, it has been a year or so since we were there last, and it is not too far from where we live. We were surprised to find the center of an archimedes bryozoan in the upper Mississippian deposits there. We also photographed an unknown fossil from the same outcrop, along with a typical assemblage of corals from the Dovonian Martin formation.

 

On a recent trip to the Tucson Mountains we caught a beautiful Sunset, and posted it as a wall paper. We also photographed a nice black-tailed rattlesnake, and a tarrantula.

 

 

Gardner Canyon Formation

On a recent trip, we set out to photograph redbeds of the Gardner Canyon formation, look for fossils, and generally get out and have a good time in the mountians. There has been a lot of rain in the Santa Rita mountains this year, and the scenery was quite spectacular.

Although we did not find any fossils in the Gardner Canyon formation (and none have been reported to my knowledge), the green vegetation against the red rocks made for some nice photo ops. We also managed to ge a nice time lapse of storm clouds over the Santa Rita mountains. You can see that here.

 

We have started to make some general simplified correlations on our Mesozoic formations page  as we continue working on our current video project.

With the August heat keeping us inside, we'll probably be udating old pages with links to high resolution images, and attempting to identify some of our previous finds. 

 Happy Trails...

Walt

walt@safossils.com

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's time we started a blog.....
I've decided to start a blog as a way to keep up with things we need to do on the site, advertise up coming trips and revisions, and identification of past finds.

Our most recent trip brought us out to the Rosemont Junction area to look over outcrops of Early Cretaceous Apache Canyon formation rocks before they are buried beneath tones of mine waste rock. A recently published Map (link) of the Rosemont area gave us a few clues as to where to find outcrops. We found much of the area is private land, but we managed to find a few outcrops on forest service land. The only fossils we found were cross sections of what appeared to be Gastropods. We did manage to get a few photos for our up coming feature video of Mesozoic rocks in Southern Arizona. We'll be spending more time in this area in the near future, as we delve more into the Jurassic and Cretaceous sediments of Southern Arizona.

A recently purchased geology map of the Santa Rita Mountains has required us to revise a couple of previous expeditions. Outcrops we had identified as Concha Limestone should have been identified as the Rain Valley formation. We've never visited the "Type" area for the Rain Valley formation, and outcrops in the Tucson Mountains contain a lot of sand, and quartz blebs, so this did not look like the Rain Valley formation we are use to seeing. We'll probably have to do some more back-tracking as we continue to study the map, and visit more of the “Type” areas for different formations. If we ever get a detailed geology map of the Canelo Hills, we’ll probably have to do some more major back-tracking.