Discovering My First Fossil Site

My grandfather’s ancestral home is in a small mountain town on the western border of Virginia, surrounded by pastures and forest. My nonagenarian grandmother still lives there in the warmer months. My brother and I used to spend hours exploring their 20-acre “back yard,” visiting with the cows and admiring everything that lived there.

But not the rocks. Dull, gray, pitted sandstone is exposed all over the hillside. It crumbles when rubbed, so no one bothers to build with it, beyond piling rough stones. My grandparents knew of nothing special about them. They were good to climb on, or to hold up a shed, but not much else – until one day when we accidentally broke some.

A piece of Sandstone that I brought home from my grandmothers house. 

Somewhere around the time I was in middle school, my father had a notion to cook a roast over an open pit of coals. We built a fire ring in the woods out of whatever loose stones were handy. It turned out not to be the best choice.  The rocks were saturated from a recent bout of rain. After a couple hours of expanding in the heat, we starting hearing loud popping.  The rocks were cracking and even exploding! No one got hurt and the roast was delicious, so we didn’t think much of it, until we saw the inside of the rocks. Inside the dull, gray crust were orange, yellow and white centers – and they were pitted with shell impressions. Fossils!

Up to that point, I’d only ever seen fossils in museums or as occasional gravel when we traveled. Here they were right under my feet, and all over the hill. That’s what those pock marks were, eroded impressions of the shells. My brother and I were so excited that we spent the rest of the trip throwing rocks down the hillside onto boulders to smash them open and see what was inside. I still have some of them today.

Unfortunately, that was the last time we went smashing open rocks in those woods together. As we got older, the expectation became that we should stick around with the adults in the house, especially the grandparents that could no longer get up the hill as easily.

However, one of those rocks I brought home ages ago (and subsequently stabilized so it wasn’t crumbing in the attic) was unbroken. It has some very worn brachiopod impressions on top and has been waiting for decades to reveal its contents, when I had the right tools to do it carefully. This morning, I finally cracked it open and I was not disappointed! Brachiopods on top of brachiopods are spread across layers of sand and the exposed surface is a wonderful 3D collage.

Epilogue: I spent the next couple hours pouring through my ever-growing personal library to see what I could find out about them.  Just finding that tiny town on the geological survey map proved challenging, but in the end I got some details. The house is sitting on top of a section of the Middle-Devonian Ridgeley Sandstone Formation, which follows the length of the valley in a narrow band horizontally, and 100 feet deep. It is known to USGS for abundant fossils, especially Spiriferid  brachiopods. Somewhere out there in my grandmother's back yard, 300 miles away, more sea life is calling to me to be discovered.