The Blocked Bridge on the LaBarque

Bridge over Doc Sargent Road

I've seen Roman aqueducts; they're very cool and they still work. This one on LaBarque Creek is more basic. I enjoy sidling down the sandy creek banks and hunting the fascinating fossils near this bridge on Doc Sargent Road. This area was once the shore of the great inland ocean, so the fossils are of marine plants. Imagine a time when plants, only plants, ruled the Earth! Was there love? Oh, there had to be! The rocks pictured below are from my latest hunt. Fortunately, fossils on rocks almost always lie fossil-side-up, making hunting a little simpler.

Yet this was the first time I actually  saw how one of the bridge's two ducts was clogged near to its "ceiling" with sand. Now I fully understand why in 2015 and 2017 the LaBarque, usually not much more than a stream, rose so quickly and forcefully over its banks and the adjacent road.

Seeing new and huge deposits of sand choking the creek, after those floods, did bother me, but it seems that Nature took care of them. This, though, I can't see a solution to.

Don Robinson on the Rocks

Hiked this morning at Don Robinson State Park, with all its raw-looking, yellow-orange must-be-iron-in-there sandstone rock cuts. I'd taken some wildflower photos and then propped myself up to rest against a rock cut that exposed alternating layers of sandstone and limestone, like cake, and saw some of the yellow rocks freckled with black.

Closer inspection showed the freckles to be what looked like tiny plant fossils. (Photographed with a magnifying lens; actual size, 3cm.) Amazed and excited, I looked harder. Most of these enchanting fernlike things were pressed into a single layer of the rock. Five miles away at my place we don't have this type of sandstone and we don't have these.

The dark lines like black pepper are the "fossil" layers.

But, surprise--they are not plants! They are dendrites, deposits of manganese oxide, that have fooled a whole bunch of people, including me now, into thinking they are plant fossils. Internet says, "They form as water rich in manganese and iron flows along tiny cracks between layers of limestone and other rock types." I don't know about the manganese, but the rock there has iron and limestone, so if this is Wednesday it must be dendrites.

Fossicking a Brachiopod

As a gatherer in a month without mushrooms, vegetables, fruits or nuts, I am drawn to the LaBarque Creek streambed 50 yards away and entertained by fossils from the Ordovician Period -- 400 to 500 million years ago, when Missouri was underwater, specifically warm seawater. I found today the imprint of an ancient living creature, a simple clam-like bivalve called a brachiopod. As the first human being to lay eyes on it I never know what to say. It's an honor to meet this bookmark in time. Did it know it was beautiful?

"Fossicking" is a British-ism for "searching for gemstones among matrix rocks," but I like applying it to the enjoyable pursuit of fossil hunting. Have found fossils of marine plants and coral and creatures such as this brachiopod. Fossicking is made easier by the amazing fact that rocks with fossils and imprints usually lie on the ground fossil-side up.