Mazon

On the way back from Louisville we detoured and spent about an hour and a half fossil-hunting in the Mazon Creek park. There were once coal strip mines, and the tailings include some very well-preserved soft-bodied fossils. The loop we walked was very much overgrown and covered with long dry grass and medium height green grass, alive with ticks. (We disposed of at least 60 on the first leg of the trip--very few on the rest.) Here and there one could find a few promising rocks, but the bulk of those I picked up were by the road.

You can sometimes crack a rock open with a hammer, but that's not reliable and can crack it in the wrong plane to view anything. The approved approach is to soak them in water and then freeze them--perhaps repeatedly. We'll see. I picked up quite a few opened and discarded rocks by the roadside--some of which look rather jelly-fishy. Somebody was impatient.

The strip mines are now oddly shaped lakes, with hills in between.