Fossil Hunting at Dinmore Quarry

In an attempt to get involved at uni, and do some really cool stuff, I joined a couple of the student groups here. One of them is the Environmental Science Society! It's a club for students and other UQ community members who are interested in Environmental Sciences. Two weekends ago they held their second event. It was a day trip to the Dinmore Quarry to go fossil hunting! I was so excited because I love anything having to do with earth's past environment (there's a reason that I wanted to be a paleontologist when I was little, and am planning on getting a PHD in paleoecology and paleoclimatology) and I've never gone fossil hunting before. We left around 10a and carpooled to the site, which was about 40 minutes outside of the city. A quarry of course is a mine for minerals, so this site was basically a huge hole in the ground (see below). This quarry has been in operation for a very long time, and the site has been studied for about 100 years!

We scrambled into the quarry and basically smashed rocks for the next 2 hours. I didn't have a rock hammer with me, I really need to get one, so I was a bit sad when a bunch of the other club members pulled out their hammers and started breaking apart the rocks. However, I needn't have worried. The rocks were layered shales, and were extremely easy to break apart (see below left). So I was able to break apart the rocks with my hands, since they were so nicely layered the cleavage was incredibly easy to break into stratified chunks (below right). 

These layers were formed in the Triassic and had a ton of Triassic flora trapped inside and preserved in the organics that made up the shale. As we broke the rocks apart we found grasses (see left below) and ferns (see right below) trapped in different layers of the rock. It was like peeling back layers of the past! Part of the reason that I want to study the past climate and ecosystems of the Earth is because if we understand the past we will be better able to understand the future and how we as humans may affect it. This is vital in an age that has been called the "anthropocene" because the current greatest driving force in earth's environment is a single species, humans. I want to help us better prepare for the future in a way that I find intriguing. 

This passion stemmed from the wonder that I felt as a little kid to be learning about the ages of dinosaurs and all of the amazing animals that no longer exist. To me it was more magical than a make-believe world because they actually happened! And scientists use what tools they have to flesh out what that place was like, and why it was that way. It's exciting and wondrous, and there is always more for us to discover, and I can't wait until I'm able to contribute to that pursuit.