Week Five

Hello loyal followers....
So this week (five) I have been compiling my pyrite framboid diameter data after measuring them with the "imagej" program. The samples I did take BSE images of, totaling seven, were put into histograms with % of frequency on the y axis and framboid diameter in the x. I also made box and whisker plots for the same samples to compare the two graphs and see which one I happen to like better, histogram wins--at least with me (ahem...Diana). Ill post an example(s) histogram on the blog.

After I make the graphs I had to make some observations. So what I first did is I used the excel program to find max framboid diameter, mean diameter, and standard dev. I also had to find the inchofabric indexes of some of the samples that had none. So now that I had that info and the histograms I found that with increasing inchofabric index(ii) (i.e. increased bioturbation) that framboid size indeed does increase, just as many of the paper I've read predict. I was also evident that with increasing ii the distribution of the framboid size does increase, you can see this on the histograms I put up below.

The next step of this data analysis was to plot the mean framboid dia. vs. the ii, to see if there is any relationship--look below to see for yourself!
The rest of the week consisted of me preparing some more samples to go down the SEM with. I'll be looking at ten samples next week...hopefully the instrument will be nice this time.

Next week also being the last week of summer I'll be preparing the poster for the summer scholars poster symposium the first week of classes, so stop by! And also I'll being looking at my images for the last samples and will take notes of type-2 framboids (not type-1 like before) and the populations of pyrite xls compared to framboids, to see if there is any interesting relationships.
Here are the histograms: sample BM-68 has a mean fram. dia. of 5.45 microns and an ii of 5, sample BM-59 has a mean fram. dia. of 4.29 and an ii 1, also note how the distribution changes. The other graph is rough I admit but it get the point across, there is definitely a relationship (linear?) to mean fram. dia. and ii. Alright till next week! -CJ

Rare find at Roaring Brook

Hello again All,

Last Friday Diana and I went out to look at several localities that CJ and I had previously visited.  At our first stop, a section of the Roaring Brook river about a half mile downstream from Whittaker Falls, while looking at one of the rock shelves I noticed an exceptionally long piece of Crinoid stem. Now Crinoid stems are usually no more then a few segment pieces long because of how fragile they are, so I decided to take a closer look.  As I moved in closer I realized that at one end of this six inch long section of Crinoid stem was in fact its actual head.  I was ecstatic, and after calling over Diana to show her we quickly worked it free from the shelf and stored it safely in the trunk of Diana's car.

For those who don't know the Crinoid is a member of the Echinodermata phylum, the same phylum as starfish and sea urchins, and look a lot more like flowering plants then an animal.  Crinoids are still alive today and date back all the way to the Ordovician, making them a living fossil along side Coelacanths and several varieties of sharks, among others.  To find a Crinoid this well articulated is rare because, as I said before, they are very fragile creatures, modern Crinoids have been known to complete break apart within 24 hours of dying, so in my opinion this poor fellow was most likely rapidly buried in some kind of storm event that, luckily for us, allowed it to be so beautifully well preserved.

Below are two photos the lovely Crinoid, the first has a penny for scale and shows the entire length of the fossil from head to the end of the stalk. The second gives an overhead view of the fossil.  You may note that the section with the Crinoid has a slightly green tint to it, that is from some biological material that I have yet to remove for fear of damaging the specimen.

For more information on Crinoids the page on the Kansas Geological Survey web site @ http://www.kgs.ku.edu/Extension/fossils/crinoid.html

More Photos

Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY















SWEET PYRITE VEINS
Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY












Wall before removal
Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY
















Sweet Brachiopods
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY

photos from localities

Diana's finger with lingulid













Awesome Burrows!!!
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY











Fallen Tree by our work area
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY















Pipe Creek in West Falls, NY
















Diana Boyer for scale
Beaver Meadow Creek
Java Village, NY














Pipe Creek
West Falls, NY

















Pipe Creek Formation at Irish Gulf Creek
Boston, NY














Emily Wooton with her Bestie, the frog
Walnut Creek
Silver Creek, NY















Irish Gulf Creek
Boston, NY

A High Resolution Paleontological, Ichnological and Chemostratograpic Study of Late Devonian Mass Extinction

How's it going?
I am the shorter of the two Emilys, aka New York Emily, and play assistant to the tall, dark, and handsome California Emily. We have been traipsing around creek beds of western New York in New Oregon, Eden, Evans/Derby, Silver Creek, Boston, West Falls, Java, Sheldon, Hume, Geneseo, Livonia, Mount Morris, and Portageville and stealing glances at an exposure at Dunkirk Beach. We have been collecting shales, be they black or green/grey, hoping to find interesting trace fossil and biomarker trends around the Frasnian and Famennian boundary, through the Upper Kellwasser black shale, all the way to the time at which the Dunkirk Formation was deposited. We recently have also been looking at the Middlesex and Rhinestreet black shales and were treated to a guided tour of some localities of these horizons by the great Dr Jeff Over of SUNY Geneseo. He has been aiding us in accessing these localities, as well as those in Java and in Sheldon, so a great amount of appreciation is owed to him.
Dr Diana Boyer also aided us in Java, by guiding us around the locality on our first traverse up there on the 8th after we (Emily, Diana, Jeff, Charles Spath, John Lohan and myself) all shared a drizzly tour of the Ithaca area by the Museum of the Earth and its participating paleontologists. After Diana's tour, Emily and I worked in the area and were treated to some lovely WNY weather, which included some strong downpours and a tree falling 20ft from our collection area, which was made up for by the collection of some very neat burrows and some brachiopod fossils.
At many of our localities, Miss Emily and I have been fortunate in finding some very neat pyritized burrows and some pyritized banding (found today at our Middlesex locality, super excited), as well as some fossils of sorts and other hip treasures.
this is the New Oregon locality, which is along Eighteenmile Creek on New Oregon Rd. This is after we removed fissile rocks but before collection

Week Three and Four

Hey Y'all,
So it is currently approaching the end of the fourth week and I'll be heading home soon for a couple days so figure I'll keep you all updated.

Week Three
This was the week I first went to SUNY-ESF in Syracuse to use their SEM, very exciting! I went Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, all for about four hours each day. This particular model was the Joel 5800 SEM which works particularly good for the SEM imaging mode, but most definitely not the BSE compo mode, the contrast and brightness knobs were especially frustrating, I'd like to thank Rob Smith, the SEM technician for helping me out with those difficult moments. I have gotten around twenty pics for each sample (there are seven samples) and had about 5 framboids in each BSE image...so I have my work cut out for me counting and measuring in excess of 700 framboids! That weekend John, Dr. Boyer, Emily, "California" Emily, and I went to the annual Museum of the Earth Symposium in Ithaca and spent the day with Dr. Carl Brett, a prominent paleontologist, touring the finger lakes area looking at Devonian age outcrops. It was a blast and a great learning experience, my thanks to Carl Brett. Finishing that weekend off, John and I went back to Witaker Falls State park to collect samples for his research. We stayed overnight at the campsite there and collected some more sample upstream of the falls the next day.

Week Four
Monday John and I were finishing up collecting samples at Witaker Falls. Tuesday I was able to get started on the analysing of the Framboid images using the Jimage program I downloaded through the NIH website. I've all ready went through three samples and have made histograms of them! And I plan on finishing up the rest of the samples today! Oh also on Tuesday John, Dr. Boyer, and I went to present for the Math club in Mahar, the presentations went well and I hope they learned something. All right I'm off to go look at those framboids...here's some for you...

Fossil communities of the Trenton formation

 Hello all,

My name is John Lohan, I'm an incoming Junior at SUNY Oswego studying geochemistry.  Currently I am working with Dr. Diana Boyer on the different fossil communities seen throughout the Trenton formation.  The Trenton formation represents a 4-5 million year range during the late Ordovician when New York state was covered by a epeiric sea.  The Trenton formation is broken up into into six member which, starting from the oldest, are the Selby, Napanee, Kings Falls, Sugar River, Deny, which is broken up into the sub-members Poland and Russia, Rust, and the Stueben.  Each of these members are exposed via multiple outcrops all throughout Trenton area in upstate New York, of which almost all are sections exposed by rivers such as the Deer and Black river.

Most of what I have been doing up until this point has been finding and evaluating various exposures of the Trenton formation in order to create a final list of localities to work on.  CJ and I would take a day and go through a list of 4-6 different potential sites.  Our directions were based on road logs from various field trip guides.  They were good directions but CJ and I defiantly got lost on more than one occasion and one or two localities seemed to have eluded us.  At the better localities we visited CJ and I collect 1-2 one gallon bags worth of samples, to be looked at and assessed back in Oswego.  The most common fossils seen were brachiopods and cephalopods, as well as crinoids and some rugose corals.  From the initial sites we visited a list of about 5 final localities has been made from which CJ and I shall sample heavily this upcoming weekend.  More about how that will go, and more, soon.

These are some photos taken at several different localities that CJ and I visited in search of fossils.  The lower two pictures are from the lower section of the roaring brooks, the left photo shows a rather large cephalopod orthocone in which you can see several of the cone's inner body chambers, and the right showcases CJ standing under one of the many different deformation structures observed at the site.