What I needed was a mentor. Starting my first-ever fossil hunt, I was wandering without coherent aim, staring at the muddy ground with a hopeless expression. Wanting this to be easy, certain that it would be very hard, I felt like a man looking behind the bureau for his car keys when he knows perfectly well he left them locked in the car. If you want to find fossils, I thought, attach yourself to somebody who knows how to look for them. There must be a technique, a knack, a secret that separates the adept from the ignorant.
We were all part of a group of 22 fossil hounds who were scouring the mine debris. We were on an outing sponsored by the Field Museum, which had provided five staff members to keep us happy and well-informed. We were a dedicated bunch. When the rain started really coming down, one person took refuge with a Stephen King novel in the chartered bus that had transported us to the mines. The rest of us stayed out, slipping and sliding on the bare slopes and amassing large collections of rocks.
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Local fossil collectors combed through the heaps of rock and dirt and then passed their findings along to the professional paleontologists, who published as quickly as possible. The first academic paper on Mazon Creek fossils appeared in 1864. Since then all sorts of distinguished scientists, including Edward Drinker Cope, one of the founding lunatic geniuses of paleontology in America, have published hundreds of papers on the Mazon Creek fossils. To date, about 325 species of animals and perhaps 350 species of plants have been found in Mazon Creek sites.
The most famous of Mazon Creek’s fossils is the Tully monster, a wormlike creature of, as they say in the journals, uncertain affinities. The first fossil of Tullimonstrum gregarium was pulled from Pit 11 about 30 years ago by Francis J. Tully, a local man who was into fossil collecting as a hobby. He took his find to Dr. Eugene Richardson at the Field Museum, and Richardson published a description in 1966, naming the fossil in honor of its discoverer.
I certainly have a fine collection of concretions from my collecting trip. However, I don’t know for certain that they have fossils in them. You can stand a concretion on edge and bang it with a hammer. If it is ready to split, it will split along the plane of weakness created by the fossil. So you bang a couple of times, but if it shows no signs of splitting you stop hammering. Further beating will just crush the whole rock.
