I’m so glad I joined a Missouri fossil hunting group! A few weeks ago, we took a field trip to a highway crosscut near House Springs, Missouri, where we found lots of fossils from the Ordovician Period (400-450 million years ago). Finding real fossils really brings home our humble place in the much much larger scheme of things. On these photos, you’ll see lots of brachiopods (they look like sea shells), crinoids (they look like plant stalks, but they were animals), bryozoans & coral.

These animals existed twice as long ago as the earliest dinosaurs. Back then, Missouri was almost entirely covered by ocean. These fossil creatures lived LONG before the existence of Pangea, the time (200-300 MYA) when the continent we now know as North America was contiguous with Africa, South America, and Europe all existed as a single continent. During the Ordivician, most of the world’s land was collected in the southern hemisphere as a supercontinent scientists now refer to as Gondwana. Most creatures from this era were not fossilized, but occasionally they were suddenly covered by a mud slide under the ocean, preserving the fossils. In selected highway crosscuts, these fossils can be found.

Hint: click on the photos and then enlarge them to see a lot more detail.