Fossil Hunting!

Okay, so it's not so much fossil hunting--they're everywhere--but still it was really a blast. Everyone's looking for the big guys--preferrably a complete trilobyte. This venture was an activity organized by the folks at the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca. Way, way cool.

So, here's some of the cool stuff I found:
1. The back half of a trilobyte! It's a greenops boothi, which is apparently quite common in this area. It's from the middle Devonian period, probably, which occurs sometime during the Paleozoic era. And I got all that from this site.
2. A tiny (quarter-inch) Amocoelia umbonata, which are small brachiopods, kinda clam-like.
3. Some other small brachiopods, with wing-like shapes...almost like an Egyptian god.

(And here's a cool publication from the folks at USGS.)

It's so much fun just digging about and imagining the lives of these tiny creatures. How did they live? How did they die? What did they eat, and who ate them? You can tell I'm definitely not a scientist--I just want to make up stories for the critters.