[Rockhounds] fossilized soft tissue etc...

[J. R. Hodel]

Hi all:

Axel, you're breaking me up on the cartoon.  For what it's worth, that particular cartoon rarely makes total sense to me, so an armed coprolite works just fine for me.

Way back in 1991 Martha and I visited the Green River Formation area of SW Wyoming, Fossil Butte National Monument, etc.  We were in a rock shop near there, run by a coal miner and his wife, when we heard the miner shout from the back of the shop, "Honey, you should see the coprolite I found this morning!  It's so perfect!  It even has squeeze marks!"

His wife was totally embarrassed and said "I'm sorry, you'll have to excuse him, he's just a coal miner!"  Then my wife said, "That's OK, I'm a coal miner's daughter" and I chipped in with "My GrandDad was a miner, and my brother put himself through college by mining for a couple of years."  Which just added to her embarrassment.  It (her blush) was a beauty.  The copro was sweet too.

Anyway, on to geology: I saw a photo of remnant skin of this newly revealed beauty, and the scales were hexagonal and the size of your thumbnail!

The story had a quote to the effect that they could be sure there were stripes in the skin, and mentioned that current day scaled animules with stripes were usually brightly colored.  The skinks that skitter up my stucco everyday have stripes, and they're neon irridescent!  Imagine a giantneon-blue-green-red irridescent 35-ton monster running through the primeval forest with fernish trees thrashing one way and the other.  Imagine running yourself right behind because A Carnivore was chasing the shiny giant!!

It snowed here yesterday, then turned to rain in the evening to create slush.  Now it's 17 degrees F, way too cold for slush to stay liquid.  Oh, Joy, Winter is here!  It didn't even cover up the mud and leaves, so it looks like a white wonderland covered with leaves and dirt.  Yuck!

Keep on rockin', where the ground ain't frozen!

JR

PS, There's a park called Dinosaur National Monument, with a big dino quarry you can visit.  There's over 20,000 bones on the rock face, with a hadrosaur face 6 feet tall looking out at you from the cryptozoic stone universe.  I was so awed I didn't even take photos for being stunned!  Near Vernal UT, and worth the trip (from anywhere! ) all by itself!  If I had seen that as a youth, my whole life would have been different!


       
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