Field Trip to Vulcan Sycamore Quarry

This was a club field trip to the Vulcan Quarry in DeKalb, IL April 13th, along with Dr. Roy Plotnick's Paleontology class from UIC. The quarry exposes mid- late Ordovician Period. I was primarily interested in the spoil piles of discarded Maquoketa rocks. There were abundant Isotelus fragments in what looked like the upper Scales Shale and the Brainard. The Galena and Platteville groups seemed to be piled together, but I didn't spend too much time examining these rocks. After a 15 minute training session and driving into the collecting area, we only had about 2.5 hours total at the quarry - not very much time. It was fun pointing out to the students a large slab of Isotelus parts which they apparently did not see. Shortly thereafter, one of the students found a large complete enrolled Isotelus sp.


Galena/Platteville

Isotelus cranidium before

after

Some microfossils

Conodont (scolecodont?)



I was able to extract this tiny gastropod to make a slide. The fossil is barely visible to the naked eye, about the size of a grain of sand.


Here is the slide image at 350X magnification.





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