We had a beautiful day to collect Cretaceous crabs in Mississippi, though it did get pretty warm given the work required to free the crabs from the matrix. This site has produced and unbelievable amount of decapod fossils over the years, but time and vegetation is making it a little more difficult to find them. Even given the challenges it remains a great and productive site for a wide range of fossils and the small group that showed up for this field trip had a terrific day and found some great fossils. Here are some of the finds:
Mollusks
The shells from this site generally require care to collect, the shell material is quite chalky and will rub off and blow away if you are not extremely careful, but there are some truly interesting shells at the site to include this fascinating example below.
There are always some large Exogyra oysters to be found as well.
Vertebrates
Vertebrate material is not super common at the site, however it can be found to include shark, fish, marine reptile, and even the potential of bloat and float dinosaur remains. On this trip we did not find any teeth but we did find a large shark vertebra and fish otoliths (ear stones).
Crustaceans
The main feature at this site are the crabs and other decapods which we found some great specimens on this trip. Here are some of the crunchy crabs (primarily Dakoticancer australis) and ghost shrimp (Mesostylus mortoni) fossils found on this trip.
These were primarily dug out of the matrix looking something like the following when first exhumed.
It was another great day in the field and well worth the drive for the intrepid four members (Prescott, Logan, Jim, and Bruce) that made it. Hope to see everyone next time!
Jim Braswell, APS President