|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
This is one of the quarry's "overburden" piles. They take all of the material from on top of the granite they want and pile it up in huge hills. From these hills you can find thousands of shark's teeth. We also find some of their vertebrae, along with bony fish skulls, vertebral columns teeth and scales. Some plesiosaur material is upon these hills too, as well as snails and belemnites. Dr. Lewis has recovered a few small dromeosaur teeth, hadrosaur teeth and our mystery bones! I don't know why the quarry puts these granite cubes up here, but they make great tables to sit and eat lunch from in the afternoon.
These three pictures are of the same spot in the Dakota Rose Quarry. One year the winter and then spring of 1997-98 was the same time of the floods in Grand Forks and Fargo. You can see how the water filled up the pit. It was always wet and cold and limited some of us in collecting during these times.
Here is the flat area that we usually collect plesiosaurs from. It takes a hammer and chisel at times to get the material out. It's in gray marl that is in all the nooks and crannies throughout the granite.
This is a view from on top of one of the hills looking at Hunter's Quarry. We haven't found as much material from this quarry. We have found lots of shark's teeth here though.
Another view of the location of the better plesiosaur collecting area. We have to wait for certain quarries to be open to us and some times they are full of old rusted tools that are waiting the next time they drill to remove granite.
This last view is of the upper wall we have to either go around or climb. I found a pair of propodials (flippers) in rocks from on top of this wall. Then I had to stuff the fossils in my jacket (it was raining pretty hard) climb down this wet, half broken ladder and slog through the mud to get the fossils inside and protected.