DMC Field Trip, October

The Southeast Federation of Mineralogical Societies, Inc
The Friendly Federation - Founded in 1976 to serve.

DMC Program of the SFMS Field Trip Committee

An Official Field Trip of The KYANA Geological Society, Louisville, KY(HOST)

Saturday and Sunday, October 17-18, 2009
Taylorsville, Spencer County, Kentucky

Lower Kentucky River

Falls of the Ohio State Park
"Ordovician rocks and fossils"

Our plans, weather permitting, will be to take the participants on Saturday the 17th to a series of road cuts in the area of Taylorsville, Spencer County, Kentucky. We will be collecting Upper Ordovician fossils. The stratigraphic section ranges from the [Eden Fm - older name based on faunal assemblage Caster,Dalve,& Pope 1955 or the Kope based on Lithology Martin 1975] up through the Liberty or Bull Fork Fm. A good reference for these fossils is Cincinnati Fossils, An Elementary Guide to the Ordovician Rocks and Fossils of the Cincinnati, Ohio Region, by R.A. Davis, Publication 10, Cincinnati Museum of Natural History, 1720 Gilbert Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio 45202, Phone [513] 621-3889.

The primary formation we will be collecting in is the McMillan or Grant Lake, or the Maysvillian Stage . Most of the fossils will be loose, very little digging is required. There are about 100 different fossils in these units. Most participants can expect to find with some diligence 25 different fossils. There are many varieties of brachiopods, bryozoans, pelecypods, gastropods, along with corals, cephalopods, rare finds include trilobites, edrioasteroids, and a very rare cyclooystoid was found here a couple of years ago.

Taylorsville State Park will be our meeting site for Saturday morning October 17, 2009. Highway 155/55 runs north south through the town of Taylorsville, turn east on to highway 44, take highway 44 to highway 248, take highway 248 east to the entrance of Taylorsville State Park, turn south on Park Road, pass the Park Office and to the covered picnic shelters, park here. If you go too far you will end up at the Possum Ridge Boat Ramp.

I would like to leave the meeting area at 9:00 AM EST. We will be collecting along highway 44 and perhaps highway 155.

If you arrive early please do not collect these stretches of highway.

At a time yet to be determined, we will break from collecting and join KYANA Geological Society at our Annual Picnic at one of the covered shelters where we met in the morning. It is a pot-luck with KYANA providing the meat [ham & turkey] and the drinks. You are not required to provide anything, it is our treat!

For the afternoon we will either continue to collect the Taylorsville area or travel to the Frankfort area and collect in the Middle Ordovician, Lexington Limestone along the valley of the Lower Kentucky River [very pretty]. The KYANA Fossil Study Group has been investigating this area and has been tracking trilobite bearing layers in hope of finding Kentucky's largest Ordovician trilobite Isotelus sp. We have found hundreds of tails, a few heads, some thorax segments attached to tails and at least three trilobites that were all there except for the head. One small enrolled one was complete. The Isotelus trilobites range in size from one inch to ten inches in size in these deposits.

There will be enough KYANA member guides to do both.

What to bring: Standard rock hound tools [hammer, chisels, goggles, wrapping materials, buckets] we will be in the sun, sunscreen, sun hat, sun glasses.

You can access our website http://kyanageo.org/ and see some of these fossils and more.

Sunday we be touring the Falls of the Ohio State Park. Meet in the Parking lot behind the building at 10:00 AM EST. If you intend to visit the Interpretive Center [recommended], do not pay the parking fee it is included in the admission fee.

What to bring: A shoulder bag or knapsack for carrying snacks, water, dry socks, extra pair of shoes, camera in watertight container, walking stick, sun glasses, sun hat, bug spray, sunscreen. This will be a fairly strenuous tour and will involve crossing the river bottom on algae covered rocks with up to two feet of water and some current. The surface of the Falls is dry beyond this point, and the variety of fossil corals exposed is astounding along with large silicified snails and other fossils. Bring a scale or a form of measurement, some of the coral heads are really big. There are no bathroom facilities out on the outer beds. This tour is dependent on the river level.

You can view the Falls of the Ohio website at http://www.fallsoftheohio.org/
Map for directions to the Falls of the Ohio: http://www.fallsoftheohio.org/map.html

The camping rates at Taylorsville Lake are;

Primitive $15 Sunday - Thursday, $ 17 Friday & Saturday

RV $ 21 Sunday - Thursday, $23 Friday & Saturday

"Field trips are open to all members of associated clubs of the DMC program of the SFMS Field Trip Committee and to all members of SFMS member clubs who have provided their membership with SFMS liability insurance. Because of insurance requirements, members of the GENERAL PUBLIC are NOT invited on this or any DMC program field trips!"

DMC Program / SFMS Field Trip committee's purpose:
To collect field trip information from it's member societies; schedule and coordinate field trip dates; disseminate field trip information to all member clubs so that each member society may publish this information as one of their "official" scheduled field trips.
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