Nathan Newell

This site at Mint Spring, VA, is interesting in that it proves you can find fossils in the most incongruous of places. It’s actually in the parking lot of a hotel, which means it’s safer and more accessible than many of the road cut sites. I’ve only found graptolites here, and why only graptolites are preserved and nothing else, I have no idea. The strata are nearly vertical, forming a wall of sedimentary rock. Some of the best specimens are readily visible on the left side of the exposure, but I doubt they can be easily extracted. It’s probably more fruitful to look along the base of the wall to find loose specimens. The rock tends to break off in extremely fragile plates, so be careful. Check out my fossils to see more detailed pics of the graptolites I found here.

Location: Mint Spring, VA.

Coordinates: 38.07666, -79.08472.

Age: Ordovician.

Formation: Edinburg Formation, Lincholnshire and New Market Limestones.

Fossil Types: Graptolites. #fossil #collection_site

Here’s a close up of an interesting fossil I posted earlier this week. It’s a bed of crinoid segments, presumably from different individuals of different ages, considering the various sizes that are evident. Some of them are stacked too, with smaller segments overlapping larger ones. #fossil

This is my go-to book for fossil collecting in Virginia and West Virginia: Fossil Collecting in the Mid-Atlantic States, by Jasper Burns. The majority of the sites I visit come from this book. This and Google Maps make it easy to pin-point exactly where to go to find fossils.