Rock On!

Yesterday we went on a family fossil hunt. Noodle is studying rocks this week and if you know her, you've probably heard her say she wants to be a "collector" when she grows up. Being a collector, to her, means walking around and collecting things that she finds. (And if you know me, you know I can't stand anything that gathers dust!) Going on a fossil hunt was right up her alley, though. Tallahassee, however, doesn't have any rocks. The closest thing we have is pipe clay, and we'd need a backhoe to dig for fossils in that stuff. So we all piled in the car and made our way down Highway 98 into Taylor county and the Aucilla River area. There is a large amount of limestone and sandstone here--so much so that there are several quarries in the area. These quarries, however, are private corporations and don't allow little people like us to wander around in them (we asked). So, we wandered around near them and found lots of good spots. We forgot to bring any tools (silly us) so we couldn't bring home any of the fossils that were in the giant chunks of rock. But we did find a few that were portable. There were tons of bivalves, sand dollars and echinoderms. The kids really enjoyed finding them and pointing them out to us. Hopers ran around like a nut picking up rocks and yelling, "Fossews, fossews!"
An echinoderm (Sea Urchin) fossil that we found. In the surrounding rock were it's spines.