Crinoid Fossil in Illinois Backyard Flagstone - March 2022
Last Fall, I was moving around a few pieces of flagstone in our yard when I - for some reason - looked closer at one of the stones and I realized I was staring at a fossil. Weird. Or at least it seemed weird to me. I examined the piece of flagstone and realized there were a few fossils imprinted in the stone, so I went looking on the Web to figure out what we had. Turns out, we're the owner of some Trilobites that are hundreds of millions of years old (yes...read that again... hundreds of millions of years old ). Kinda neat, right? Finding it and researching the fossil was a fun little exercise to do with the kids. Imagine my delight when I was out in the yard this past week and noticed that a few of our pieces of flagstone and split open due to the winter and freezing. I picked the pieces up to see if any of the freshly-revealed surfaces showed off any new (to us) fossils. And, sure enough....along the edge of one of them looks like this: Below is another, more zoom'