Thanks for sharing your field experiences, Andrew. I'd say you did pretty well.

Harry


At 01:55 AM 9/11/2008, you wrote:
>Moving across the island and up a bit, I was
>dropped off at Shelter Point, on the south side
>of Campbell River, with the southern tip of
>Quadra Island not too many hundred meters
>offshore. I hoped to collect fossil ammonoids
>here, as the book "West Coast Fossils" stated
>that this was a locality. Well, the rocks did
>contain the odd leached bivalve fragment, but
>the concretions were too large and hard to break
>with an 8lb sledgehammer; I did see evidence
>that rockhounds, those nemeses of
>paleontologists, had been there, but they had
>obviously not met with success either. So… to
>the Recent fauna instead. The shore is almost
>flat, so the tide chased me in, but was
>basically a sandflat covered with cobbles and
>small boulders. Turning boulders resulted in one
>Thais emarginata, a great collection of T.
>lamellosa displaying good variation in sculpture
>(though no truly frilly ones) and a wide color
>range (pure white, beige, gray, tan, dark-brown,
>bright orange; white with mauve, tan or brown
>bands, tan with brown bands) and Lirabuccinum
>dirum. Crassostrea gigas were nice and frilly,
>and as most were attached to barnacles or small
>pebbles, or lying loose, they were easily
>collectable; therefore I took the opportunity to
>make up for the previous lack in my collection.
>I also found one live Nuttallia obscurata lying
>on the sand between cobbles. Dead shells
>included Clinocardium nuttallii, tresus
>nuttallii, Macomona nasuta, Venerupis
>philippinarum, Protothaca staminea (one live),
>Crepipatella dorsata (the first I've seen) and
>one 4cm Euspira lewisii. So, though I was a bit…
>er… PEEVed at the lack of fossils, the Recent
>shells were fine for such an uninspiring
>locality. Then I had to sit for an hour and a
>half in a "polarfleece" jacket which the cool
>breeze blew through, waiting to be picked-up.
>
>... this 250-line (whose screen is this more
>than 250 lines? Certainly not mine!! On mine
>dividing this posting into TWO parts brought
>both parts to well under 250 lines each, yet I
>had to cut the original part 1 up TWICE!!) is a bad joke...
>
>Next was another fossil locality detailed in
>that fossil book. Again the book proved to be,
>well, let me be kind and say "less than
>precise". Starting at the bridge by Stotan
>Falls, Puntledge River, just outside Courtenay,
>as advised by the book, the rock was too
>frittery to bear collectable fossils, and the
>concretionary layers were unfossiliferous
>sandstone. I was looking for hard unweathered
>gray siltstone, but only found a few loose
>concretions of such matrix, none of which were
>fossiliferous. There were lots of signs of
>rockhounds… freshly-broken rock everywhere.
>Moving downstream, I met with more
>disappointment… that book was proving to be not
>much better than useless. I found scraps of 3
>small decalcified flattened ammonoids.
>Eventually, having been scouring the flaking
>disintegrating sandy silts under an overcast
>sky, the sun came out. Looking the same outcrop
>over again, I soon saw by its own shadow a small
>heteromorph ammonoid. About 1.5 meters away I
>found another. Both were a straight shaft with
>the beginning of a terminal hook at the anterior
>end; one had an open flat coil at the other end,
>with an odd small oblique shaft between the coil
>and the main shaft. Both were almost flattened
>and decalcified; the latter specimen showed a
>ventral margin bounded by tubercles. I haven't
>been able to identify them. Certainly the book,
>which states that another small heteromorph is
>abundant in the "shales" along this river, isn't
>correct. Anyway, it took me quite a while to
>collect these crumbling specimens, and a long
>time to reassemble them with superglue when back
>in Calgary (and of course some chips disappeared
>while collecting, so both are missing some bits…
>just as well I photographed both before starting to collect).
>So, rather bitter, I headed back for the road in
>response to an impatient cellphone call… The
>bright side of today's efforts were that on the
>walk in I had passed through forest, and ended
>up with 6 live and one dead Monadenia fidelis in
>my containers or wrapped in newspaper.....

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