While planning for this trip I added a ton of interesting waypoints to my Google Maps.  While scrolling around on the map looking for things to go do I ran across the Oak Springs Trilobite area outside Caliente, NV.  It was less than 2 hours away from the parents’ house so Jason and I decided to drive up there and camp for the night!

Originally completely immersed with water 500-524 million years ago, the fossils to be explored at Oak Springs are the remains of animals that lived in this seabed. Most of which were comprised of the Olenellidae family, a sort of crustacean-looking creature with a shell similar to a horseshoe crab with jointed legs, and the ability to curl into a ball.

We brought our rock picks and folding chairs and got to work digging shale out of the ground and splitting it into pieces to find the fossils.  We found a lot of heads and tails of the critters, but nothing spectacular.  Jason went up the hill to check out that area and I kept digging out chunks of shale when I realized there was a fossil a few inches long just sitting there on the edge of one of the rocks.  I set to work carefully trying to break it out but still ended up busting it in half. (of course…)

I didn’t take many pictures of this trip due to all of the digging.

Unfortunately, I ended up not feeling very well that day and neither of us wanted to bother digging all of the camping stuff out of the truck and setting it all up and actually camping, so we turned this into a day trip and drove back to sleep in an actual bed with an actual shower!