Mike here –
When the students were on spring break a few weeks ago, I decided to take a few days off to go fossil collecting. The first site I went to was the spillway for the reservoir in Caesar Creek State Park. This is a special place for me: it’s the first site we went to collect fossils from during my paleontology course when I was a junior in college. I’ve been going back to this site for about 14 years, but I hadn’t been since 2013, when Jen, Adriane, our friend Wes, and I all went on a long weekend. During this time, Adriane and Jen were helping Alycia Stigall build the Ordovician Atlas. If you are interested in learning more about the organisms found, rock outcrops, and more head to that website!
This site is exposed Ordovician limestone and shales (click here to learn more about types of rocks), representing warm, shallow marine environments. Three rock formations are exposed: Waynesville, Liberty, and Whitewater. If you are interested in learning more about rock formations, click this link which will go into detail on formations! Because collecting is restricted to the base of the spillway, all of the rocks are mixed together and it is difficult to tell which formation the specimens come from. When collecting from Caesar Creek, one must obtain a pass from the Visitor’s Center—run by the Army Corps of Engineers—and agree to follow their rules. Probably the most frustrating rule is that one can’t use tools to extract specimens, not even another rock! But, regardless of these rules, this location is safe for individuals and families to come collect.
I was excited to see what would be exposed in the spillway. This was the first warm weekend of the year, and it had rained the day before. I figured fossils would have washed out from the wall and would not be picked over yet. Usually after a good rain you get lots of new fossils coming out of the rock due to the increased erosion of the outcrop. So it may be wet and gloomy but good for fossil collecting! It sure paid off because today was one of the best fossil collecting I’ve ever had at Caesar Creek!
This was the best haul I’ve had from Caesar Creek in a long time. I was not able to collect many of the really cool specimens I found. They were either way too big and/or stuck in a rock and I couldn’t use tools to remove them. I’m glad I got to see so many amazing specimens and take some home!
Read more about the Caesar’s Creek Spillway on the Dry Dredgers site by clicking here or the FossilGuy’s site by clicking here.
Nice Cupulocrinus!