Fluorite and Fossils from the Walworth Quarry, NY

I was once an avid mineral collector and one of my favorites was clear Fluorite. I recently picked up the two pieces below at a show but not just because they have clear Fluorite, they also have fossils in them. They come from a quarry in Walworth, NY that mines the Lockport formation (Silurian, Gorstian stage). The Lockport is a very hard, dolomitic limestone that is used as road gravel. The rock may be hard but it develops cavities from pressure solutions and ground water dissolving it away bit by bit. Within the cavities created by this process minerals can precipitate. Sometimes the cavities result from a fossil being dissolved away too.

This first piece has a large rounded cavity with some cubes of clear Fluorite. I can't be sure but some of the calcite druze looks like it is patterned after a bryozoan.

On one side of the piece is this series of cavities that look like some sort of coral.

The second piece has a much more obvious fossil coral visible just below the mineral bearing pocket. It looks like a type of Favosite.

The Fluorite cubes on this piece are hidden deep in the pocket and are not easy to see. Were I strictly a mineral collector I would likely trim this piece down a bit more so that the Fluorite was more visible.

If you like mineral and want to see what else can be found in the Lockport Dolomite, head on over to the New York State Academy of Mineralogy website to see more.

Long Pause

It's been a while since I posted anything to my blog and I apologize to my regular readers for that. This summer I was getting some work done on my house which distracted me and took away my usual backdrop for photography (the brick wall on the back of my house). It also forced me to box up all of my fossils and put them into storage since the space was needed for the contractors to work in. Additional stress came from my day job in the form of several projects that I fell behind on and had to play catch up.

The good news is that my renovations are complete and I'm caught up with the day job. In the next few weeks I will be moving my fossils into a new, larger work space and I'll be working to sort them and find new material to write about. I didn't get a summer vacation this year but hopefully I can sneak some small trips in before winter gets too cold.

In the meantime here are some pictures of finds from this spring that don't really need full blog entries:

Phacops rana molts from the Moscow Formation at the Penn Dixie site in Blasdell, NY.

The base plates and stem attachment point of an Arthrocantha sp. Crinoid from the Moscow Formation at the Penn Dixie site in Blasdell, NY.

And a small geode formed by a fossil that contains small Calcite crystals and some blades of what I think are Barite that I found in a piece of the Tichenor Limestone (bottommost layer of of the Moscow formation) along the shoreline of Lake Erie.

That's all for now, I'll hopefully be back to regular updates in the coming weeks. Thanks for stopping by!

-Dave