Charles you wrote:
 
>THE CHARGE TO CONCH-L:  Let your imaginations run wide.  We are good at
>that! ;-)  Speculate as to what is going on.  Reflections as to the worth
>of these two collections?  Anyone else have similar situations happen to
>them?
>
>I will thank you for your input in advance.  Let the fun begin!
>
 
Since I have not had the opportunity to collect much recent material, I can
only relate two stories that have to do with fossils.
 
The first one is man intervention.  A graduate student at a local college
took a group of geology students on a field trip many years ago to a
"fossil" pit in eastern Virginia to collect and subsequently identify
fossils later as part of a geology lab test.  This particular pit contained
upper Miocene fossils that have since been reclassified as lower Pliocene.
The graduate study had done his undergraduate work in Ohio.  In order to
confuse the students (as far as correct identifications) and to make sure
they found something really "nice" he salted the pit the night before with
silicified/pyritized Devonian brachiopods that literally sparkle in the
sunlight (had been acid treated to clean them up), so they would be easy to
find.  Unfortunately, it rained later that night and much of his salted
material was buried by reworked Miocene sediments.  The students did find
some of them the next day and other people were still finding them 10 years
later!  However, pyrite is not very stable in wet Miocene sands and muds,
so the ones that were buried quickly lost there sparkle and were partially
rusted shells when found years later.
 
The second one is intervention by nature and happened to me.  I was hunting
in a Pleistocene pit in eastern Virginia.  The sediments at the bottom of
the pit were offshore marine but as one crawls higher in the pit the
Atlantic Ocean was lowering its sealevel as the last ice age began.  So by
the time you get to the top of the pit you have "fossil" sand dunes from
the regression of the ocean.  Sometimes you find isolated pieces of fossil
wood (not petrified) in the sand material but not much else, so I usually
do not look there.  However, one day I found a small oval "capsule" at the
bottom of a cliff of sand dune sediments.  It was about 1 inch long by 1/4
inch wide.  I hadn't seen anything like it before.  It looked like a turd,
but not exactly.  I looked up and saw a few others still in the wall of the
pit.  So I climbed up and retrieved them.  Didn't have a hand lense with me
that day, so put them into a 35-mm film cannister with some cotton and
continued collecting.  Several days later I took the capsules out and put
them under the microscope.  Noticed one end was cracked on one of the
capsules.  When I looked down the long axis of the capsule there was the
head of an insect looking at me!!!  Wow, I had discovered Pleistocene
insect cocoons in fossil sand dunes, never heard of anything like that.  So
I talked with one of my friends at the Smithsonian and he said we would get
them to an entomologist to look at.  As it turns out, the insects were
recent.  It was a type of wasp that burrows into the sand of a south facing
sand dunes (I guess fossil or recent!) and lays it's eggs to be warmed by
the sun until they hatch.  Oh well, what a let down until I got a call from
the entomologist who said he would like to have them because the
Smithsonian did not have any complete cocoons of that species of wasp with
the insect still inside in their recent collections.  You just never know.
 
Paul Drez
 
New Mexico
 
P.S.  Off course there are all the stories of "older" fossils being
reworked into recent sediments.  Horace Richards described a large fossil
Astarte sp. years ago from some shells washed up on the outer banks of
North Carolina.  Turns out that it was a fossil species that he had
described that was scoured out of fossil sediments off shore.