We Found Some Fossils In Our Northern Illinois Backyard - November 2021
I was out in the backyard doing what I spend most of my free time doing these days: dealing with the leaves. We have a mix of native trees (Kentucky Coffee Trees, Hackberry) and a couple of large Oak trees. The Oak leaves come down differently than the the rest of the trees. Rather than dropping them mostly at once, our Oaks drop leaves a little bit at a time. And the Oaks are HUGE, so there are TONS of leaves. That means, Oak leaf cleanup lasts for weeks. How I start my cleanup is by blowing the leaves into the lawn where I collect them in big piles then I begin to mulch them in and bag some of them up. As part of that blowing with the leaf blower (don't worry...I use an electric one from eGo and it isn't loud), I was cleaning up our firepit area. And, for *some* reason, I looked closely at the stepping stones that take you from our lawn to the gravel bed. One one of them - clear as day - was what sure looked like a fossil to my naked eye. I got down on my knees and