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9-Aug-2006
This summer’s weather has been a roller coaster ride. We’ve gone from burning hot with little or no rain since last November, to flash flooding and more than 8 inches rain in a week for some locations. Unfortunately neither extreme makes for good fossil finding. We did manage to get one trip in to the Sonoita area to have a look at some outcrops of Early Cretaceous Mural Limestone. The Mural was deposited in a shallow continental seaway that opened up as part of the Chihuahua trough, and is related to the opening up of the Gulf of Mexico during the late Jurassic period. The Mural is highly fossiliferous in most localities, and we found an unusual array of invertebrates including large and small Spiraled Gastropods, Oysters and other bi-valves, rudists, disarticulated fish bones and many other fossils that we could not identify. We had some help with a couple of identifications from the folks on the California message boards, but it will take a few more trips to this location before we know enough about this formation to positively identify some of the specimens. We stopped by Snyder Hill in the Tucson Mountains on another occasion, and photographed a few nice Productid Brachiopods and Gastropods. The hill was crawling with 6 inch millipedes as well, and we had to watch where we were stepping to miss the little guys. You can find a picture of one, as well as a few other interesting Sonoran Desert Critters on our wildlife page. Before your next outing in Southern Arizona, be sure to check Ron Ratkevich’s Web Site T-RAT.com. Your will find a very informative site written by one of Southern Arizona’s most knowledgeable Paleontologists. If you have not checked out our Message Boards, you have missed out on a lot of the latest news articles on Fossils and Paleontology.
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Have a great day!
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