Leaving Moab I started on one of my bigger detours. Way back in Chicago I had heard of a fossil place where you can dig for trilobites. Getting there meant detouring two hours north of I-70 through some very empty country, then down twenty miles of dirt road just south of the empty quarter of Utah, the section with nothing but salt flats. So I found myself camping near Delta, Utah, and waking up before dawn to pack up my tent and hit the road. By 9:30 I had turned onto a gravel road leading as far as the eye could see before hitting some distant hills, and by 10:00 I found this:
Twenty minutes later I had a plastic bucket and a rock hammer and was sitting on top of a large pile of shale, happily hunting. Here's one of my first finds:
I was quite the happy camper! And surprisingly, I was not alone in my enthusiasm! There were a few retired couples pounding away at the rocks as well, and then as I was getting ready to take my bucket of trilobites and head out, a van of Japanese businessmen arrived, accompanied by their American businessman colleague. I have no idea where they were from, as I was six or seven hours from Salt Lake City, and three hours from anyplace that had more than a gas station, and twenty miles down a dirt road at a place with no water or food, but they were very excited about fossils and were chatting and pounding rocks and comparing trilobite finds. It was a surreal experience. I think I saw more people at the trilobite quarry than I did in the rest of the state of Utah!
I suppose at this point, I should describe what trilobites actually are. Trilobites are arthropods from 300-500 million years ago. They resemble miniature horseshoe crabs, or little stink bugs, and they lived in shallow seas from the Cambrian until the mass extinction that killed most of life on Earth at the end of the Permian. They swam around before anything was moving on the land, and their appearance in the fossil record is the official mark of the beginning of the Cambrian period. They are cool little bugs! Here are closeups of some of my fossils:
A final note to my family - I hope you like trilobites too, because you're likely to find one in your stocking this year...
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