We went to a St. Paul city park on the Mississippi called Shadow Falls that's known as a good place in the cities to search for fossils. If you want to go, it's right at the western end of Summit Ave., by the WW1 monument. There's free off-street parking, yay!
Once you get down off the main monument area onto the trails, there's also some pretty spectacular geology! This is taken right below the monument's safety rail. You can see layers and layers of limestone:
At this point we hadn't gone far at all, but we had already found our first fossils!
Aaron scouted out some trails to get down to the riverside, north of the falls. I don't have pictures from the hiking part because the trails were a little narrow and steep, so not exactly good picture-taking! But we all made it down to the river.
From the riverside you could see the different rock layers that make up the area. There's the limestone on the top, followed by shale (which holds most of the fossils). The white on the bottom is a huge layer of sandstone - it's extremely soft, so the graffiti here is carved in instead of written on the rock.
We also poked around a little bit up and down the shore, looking at the different rock formations. One area had these HUGE slabs that were clearly sliding down towards the river. They were really fun for the girls to climb up and around.
Eventually it was time to head back up. So up up up we went...
So here's a representative sample of what we found!
We weren't able to identify everything, so that afternoon the girls and I took our finds to the science museum, to get some identification help.
At 9:00 in the picture is what we initially thought was a fossilized shell. If you look closely, it has lines on it that look like those on the kind of shell a scallop would have, if that makes sense - radiating out from a point. We took it to the science museum, though, and the scientist there identified it as actually a trace fossil! It's a piece of stone that used to be sand that had a shell on top of it. Cool, hey? Then there are the two little things that look almost like vertabrae. They are fossilized bryozoans - a colonial organism very similar to coral. If you looked closely you could see that they're covered in tiny pores, each of which was the home to one tiny animal.
At the end of the day Maisie said, "We learned so much today!!" Both girls really had a lot of fun. They loved hiking, seeing the animals, and talking about the rocks. Today my legs are sore, sore, sore. But it was a lot of fun and an experience we will definitely repeat.
