Coastal Fossils- The Winter Collection #1 (1 of 2)

 ...continued from... Coastal Fossils - Gifts of the Winter Beach #3

We collected so many interesting fossils and agates during our winter excursion to the central Oregon coast [IBLs] that it will take a couple posts to share all of them! We'll separate them into 2 main groupings: 1) Moolack Beach and 2) Lost Creek Beach. Moolack Beach will be shared first since that is the smaller collection (and I've managed to photograph all of it already!  ; )

Individual finds/fossils will be explored further as we have time.

Right! Now on with viewing the collections...

The Moolack Beach Collection / Fossils

To the right is the entire collection from Moolack Beach (except the "finds" that includes the specimens photographed and left "in situ" (in place)).

As I said earlier, the collection from Moolack Beach is smaller than the Lost Creek collection, but it is an intriguing collection...
... and we'll save the most intriguing find for last, since it will take the most space to get a good look at it.

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#13-1_M1

< This is the largest of the concretions that we collected (upper left in the "group photo" ; )  on this excursion. It measures ~ 9 1/2" long.




Even at this stage you can easily see several different types of bivalves (clams), a couple gastropods, and two fossils that are showing up as a very different sort of fossil- "brown" (see one up close below).

This is the "left edge" of the piece shown above. I'm not absolutely sure what we are looking at here, but we'll get a better idea once we have a chance to look at it closer and start carefully removing the surrounding rock.
By the way, if you can identify any of the fossils being shown we'd love to hear from you!

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#13-1_M2

This smaller concretion has a lot of intriguing things going on; this piece has a lot of exposed crystalline structure, some interesting bivalves,

...and we'll be looking at these unusual (exposed)  structures to see what they are also... >

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#13-1_M3

 This concretion appears to be all bivalves...

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#13-1_M4

This concretion is about 6 1/2" long. We will leave some of these concretions "intact" in order to share what to look for on the beach when hunting fossil concretions!

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#13-1_M5

This fossil looks like it is likely bone, but we'll see! The fossil is in moderately delicate sandstone, which will make it easier to extract.

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#13-1_M6

We also found some interesting mud stone type pieces. This one is particularly interesting since something has created/bored fairly large holes in the  mud stone (very hard mud stone in this case), including boring right through several fossils.

This one is very interesting "as is", so I doubt we will do much, if any, cleaning on it. 



 




.... sometimes you can get "help" ...

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         #13-1_M7/ 8/ 9/ 10/ 11

Several pieces with exposed shell.

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#13-1_M12

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#13-1_M13

Another concretion with assorted mollusc fossils.

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#13-1_M14/ 15/ 16

Small concretions with bivalve fossils.

Most of the following pieces have a fairly granular texture:

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#13-1_M17/ 18/ 19/ 20 

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#13-1_M21

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#13-1_M22/ 23/ 24

 

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#13-1_M25/ 26/ 24

The following pieces are agates or have some agate-like qualities:

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#13-1_M28/ 29/ 30/ 31/ 32/ 33

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#13-1_M34/ 35/ 36/ 37/ 38/ 39/ 40

 

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#13-1_M41

 

the most unique of our finds at Moolack Beach....

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#13-1_M42

This fossil ....

Join us in our ongoing Quest...
... continued in... Coastal Fossils- The Winter Collection #2 (2 of 2)[IBL]; the Lost Creek collection / fossils.