A few initial observations.
First, this is not an organized, themed, collection of fossils. My dad chased rocks for fifty years and he found a lotta strange stuff. This collection is just some of the fossils that he decided to bring into the house and display for his friends. This collection is not organized. They're not the best or worst, not the most or least valuable. Other than all being fossils, there is no organization at all.
Second, my dad didn't find all of them. In fact, I have only a vague idea where most of them came from. He might have traded for some. I wasn't around when nearly all of them were collected and I was too young to remember when I was around. If you know more about a rock, let me know!
Third, they're not for sale ... yet ... But I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm not going to live forever. Someday, somebody else is going to own all of these rocks. If you absolutely can not exist without one of them, send me a message and tell me why.
Fourth, this REALLY IS just "Part I". If the spirit moves me, I'll be doing Part II, Part III, Part IV ......... Like I said, my dad chased rocks for fifty years.
The Rocks!
I don't have the very best of my dad's fossils because he decided to do something with them. He was a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Prehistoric Museum in Price, Utah. I think that the fact that he donated his best fossils to the museum had something to do with him being on the Board. When I was a little kid, I used to play on top of a complete dino bone femur that was longer than I was tall. The museum has that now. In the garage, I remember an entire fossilized cycad about four feet tall ... complete with the fossilized "flower" on top. I have no idea what happened to it.
Here's a few chunks of dino bone ... very different from each other but probably collected from almost the same place. My dad loved dino bone. When I was a teenager, I remember that there was a room full of it in the old "chicken coop" behind the house. But when my dad retired, he focused on selling the dino bone himself. He did quite well at it! When I inherited his rocks, I was very surprised to find that room was empty!
The dino bone butterflies -- one is pictured at the top of this essay -- are the "crown jewels" of my dad's collection. My dad created these completely from scratch. He drew the design. He made the silver and gold mountings. And, of course, he polished the dino bone. His friend talked him into getting some plastic templates made of the wings and bodies of the butterflies. I still have a few of those templates ... very few. But I'm willing to send one to KinesavaROCKS.com customers. If life isn't possible for you unless you have one ... send me a message and tell me why.
This polished slab is from a whole bone. The center is replaced with fortification banding but the outside is a beautiful replacement of the actual dino bone cells.
Here's one that is a fantastic fossil of a complete dino bone vertebrae. Dino vertebrae are not hyper-rare, but they're very striking. And I've never seen a better fossil replacement than this one.
This final piece of dino bone is just an especially nice color and pattern. But check out the side view. My dad found NEARLY ALL of his bone just by walking the desert and looking for it. Now, I ask you, would you pick up a rock from the desert floor that looked like the side view?
I make this point because I experienced personal brain programming looking for dino bone on the desert with my dad. I spent so much time as a child -- while my brain was still forming -- scanning the ground for the distinctive pattern of dino bone. I'm still programmed to "see" patterns on the ground sixty years later. I'm a bear when it comes to finding coins in parking lots -- or I used to be. Now that people use a credit card for everything, there are no more coins in parking lots. This next fossil is unusual because I actually do know where it came from. About a decade after I started my career in computer programming, my wife and I took a vacation to the Caribbean island, Antigua. I found this rock in one of the dozens of trinket shops lining the road to English Harbor. I could tell it was a fossil. The man in the shop claimed it was local, but he didn't know anything else about it. The price was reasonable. So I bought it and gave it to my dad. To this day, I have no clue other than these facts. If you know more about it, send me a message and tell me.
This next one is a piece of fossilized "Henry Mountain" petrified wood. It's a nice piece that you could use to make a variety of things from cabs to slabs, even though this view doesn't really show off those features. This is a view to show a powdery yellow matrix on one side. A couple of weeks ago, a friend at Reddit RockhoundExchange asked me if I had any wood with embedded uranium. I didn't know of any at the time, but this piece might be exactly what he was looking for. My friend told me that petrified wood was a key clue that uranium hunters used to find the ore.
Later, another Reddit contributor (Not_So_Rare_Earths) confirmed the idea and added an extremely valuable reference to back it up.
It turns out that there is a whole subreddit devoted to radioactive rocks:
Radioactive_Rocks
This last rock is one that you might have seen before at KinesavaROCKS.com -- Tempskya Fern. This excellent Utah fossil has some of the finest replacement of any fossil I've seen. You can see the vascular bundles of the original plant clearly in this piece that I picked out to represent the type in the permanent "bookshelf" collection.
The Tempskya Ferns -- they lived in the heart of the era of dinosaurs -- was pretty amazing too. Today, you think of ferns as being these soft green plants that grow maybe a foot or two high. That's partly because they just don't have the internal structure -- like a tree has -- to get any bigger. They can't support their own weight if they get bigger. Tempskya Ferns grew 20 feet tall! (Source: Wikipedia) How did they do it? They had a trick ... "cables" made from tough plant fibers covered the outside and provided the support they needed. You can see the cables in a lot of the fossil Tempskya Fern.
And ... by the way ... the little chunk of wood that I used to prop up some of the fossils in these pictures is a fossil too. I think it's Eden Valley, Wyoming. But it looks just exactly like a dried up piece of real wood -- except that it's rock.
Commentaires