This is Mazon Monday post #319.  What’s your favorite Mazon Creek fossil?  Tell us at email:esconi.info@gmail.com.

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Our spring trip to Braceville Spoil Pile is coming up in May. The sign-up will kick off very soon. We have been going there for many years.

For the spring trip in 2005, Barbara Brotman, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune was there to talk to a few ESCONI members and talk about ESCONI.

She interviewed Andy Jansen, who is still a member and currently our treasurer and club librarian. See Flashback Friday #18 “So, Where’s The Shrimp?” for another of Andy’s trips to Braceville.

Here’s the announcement from the newsletter.

This article appeared in the Chicago Tribune on May 12th, 2005.

For your inner explorer, dig deep

Fossil hunters hit the motherlode near Coal City

“Utah,” said John Winters, “is pathetic compared to this.”

“This” was a 75-foot-high pile of mud outside Coal City, III. Το the uninitiated, it is an abandoned shaft mine. But 11-year-old John and a small band of self-described rockhounds are fully initiated fossil hunters. And to them, “this” was the motherlode.

They took to it with picks, shovels and dirty hands, filling buckets with what looked like reddish rocks but were likely to turn out to be fossils of clams, worms or jellyfish.

No dinosaurs here. But Randall Bultman, field trip chairman of the 300-member Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois, doesn’t miss them.
Dinosaur fossils are a mere 70 million years old. Northern Illinois’ fossils of plant and sea life are 300 million years old. “Dinosaurs are the new kids on the block,” said Bultman, of Joliet, a program manager at a mental health center.

And while dinosaur bones are fairly easily preserved, jellyfish, which are essentially bags of water, are much more complicated.

“There are only about six places in the world where the conditions were right to preserve jellyfish,” Bultman said.

We were standing at one of them.

Chicago is near the Mazon Creek area, around Braidwood and Coal City, which is world-fanous for fossils. About 290 millon years ago, it was a tropical forest at the equator that looked like today’s Amazon jungles, which only goes to show that we Chicagoans who hate cold weather have really lousy timing.

Mining in the area between br Dout 1870 and 1930 brought to pu me surface vast numbers of concretions, nodules made of siderite ho (iron carbonate) that formed round animal and plant parts. You can hunt for them on your own on public land like the Mazinia Braidwood State Fish and Wildlife Area near Braidwood.

But the public sites are severely picked over and covered in brush. When Bultman works public sites, “I look like I’ve been in a fight with a cat for hours.”

The science club, however, arranges with the owners of abandoned mines and construction sites for club members to go on to their private land. The club also carries its own liability insurance for members.

Bultman cautioned us not to expect exposed fossils. We would be collecting the concretions that contain them. They have a rounded, nutlike shape and a distinctive red color that helps even first-timers identify them.

“Often they look like a hamburger,” Bultman said.

We would take the concretions home and try to split them open by freezing and thawing them until water crackedthe fossil open.

Bultman passed around fossils from his own collection. A jellyfish looked like a discolored blob. A fantail worm had a faint whiskery shadow of a tail.

“So do you think you know what you’re looking for?” he asked. “All right. Ready, set, go!”

The younger rockhounds immediately rushed up the steep mud pile.

“It’s hard work. And you’ve got to get dirty,” said John Winters’ mother, Francine.

“I like that,” John said.

Dennis Pavlik, a computer consultant from Berwyn, found an exposed fossil of a perfectly formed worm, an elegant white curve, just lying on the ground. He couldn’t wait to show his wife.

“She’s not into this,” said Pavlik, who once spent a Christmas Eve trying unsuccessfully to crack open a fossil using a freezer and a microwave. “She says, ‘Oh, you’re going to those crazy rocks again.”

But this worm, Pavlik predicted, would impress her. “Now she’ll see it’s actually a tangible thing,” he said.

“It’s kind of like gambling fever. Once you’ve found one, you want to find more,” said Andy Jansen, of Bolingbrook, a chemical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory.

Then there is that moment “when you break open one of these concretions and it’s the first time in 300 million years that light has shone on those remains,” said Bill Carpenter, a telephone agent from Niles. That’s when Carpenter feels like he is holding the earth’s biological evolution in his hands.

One group of kids found a real prize an old, rusty mining wheel. “Maybe if the museum will take it, we can sell it,” said Daniel Kipnis, 8, of Skokie, as he chipped off dirt, the sound of his pick ringing into the air.

We were adventurers; we were explorers. And I am now a person with a bowl of frozen concretions next to the butterscotch ice cream, along with an already open fossil of a tiny, but clear, clam.

bbrotman@tribune.com