 Hello, and welcome once again to the Rugged Rockhound. Today, I am joined with my dad as we are exploring this old pit here. This is an old mining pit that they used to mine for limestone to make concrete. And there's another pit over on the other side. And the only reason I'm even here is I have this old book that talks about how, from an old rockhound, how he was over here one time and said he found horn coral fossils in these limestone units. So we're going to explore today. We may find nothing. We may find a new rockhounding location to share with you guys. Like always, I'm going to go ahead and put the GPS coordinates up here of where we're parked. There you go. Let's start looking. Let's see if we can find some horn coral fossils. Here's a close-up of what the rock looks like. It's a dark limestone. Something else to keep in mind is we could find some nice calcite crystals. You never know. You can find nice calcite crystals in limestone. But as of yet, I'm not seeing any fossils. So it just means they're not terribly abundant. And we might have to find a specific layer. But yeah, there's some white calcite right there. Looks like we're getting some crystals right there even. Small ones, but they're there. Let's just walk it over here. And I've picked up this one. And you can probably see that, that circular shape in there. Actually looks like a crescent. That is definitely a fossil, some kind. It might be part of a crinoid or a coral, but it's very small and circular. It's definitely something. But I'm not entirely sure what. Just found this piece of calcite. I don't know how well you can see it. Let's maybe take it out in the sun here. But it's better looking than a lot of the other stuff we've seen. As far as calcite goes. Something interesting. Yeah, these are kind of like... So calcite is usually what makes up like stalactites and slag mites in cave formations. And you can have that happen in very small spaces in the limestone. And that's kind of what you're seeing here. Kind of what you would see in caves, cave formations. Okay, so my dad is beating me to the punch. He's found two already. So we'll look in the shade and see how that shows up then in the sunlight. But yeah, he's already found two horn corals. So it looks like the information we have is correct. You can find horn corals here. So here they are. I've cut this one lengthwise and this one across just so I could see what they were like. So this one lengthwise. Interesting. But it kind of feels like it loses some of the structure. And his second one I took and cut across. And that looks a lot better. So I think that's probably the better way to cut these things is across them in discs rather than lengthwise. So my dad found the two horn corals coming up this little track here from the vehicle. And I just found my first one right in here. But it's very small. It's just that little thing right there. But it's a horn coral. So I just found this rock here which seems to be altered limestone where you've got calcite going through it. I thought I'd bust it open. And look at that. You got some nice calcite crystals growing in this. Some of the calcite around here is quite pretty. Some colors in there. Nice. And here is some more nice calcite. There is the good calcite around here. So I went away all the way up on top. I wasn't really finding many fossils. I did find a lot of cool calcite and things like that. Anyway I decided to come back down to where my dad had been finding the fossils. He's gonna head up that way and look a little more. But look at this. That's too perfectly coiled to be something other than some kind of a shell. And so I'm thinking it might be kind of a seashell. Kind of like, you know, like a snail shell looks. I don't think it's an ammonite. Yeah it doesn't look like an ammonite. I think it's a coiled seashell piece of one. Another coiled shell. Unfortunately that's a big rock and it's just a small shell. So I'm gonna leave that. Got some more. We've got some more nice banding in the calcite. We've got that nice alteration from the hot waters that used to come through here. And I thought I saw something cool over here too. Yeah this one. It's got dendrites in it. Nice. I might be able to cut that and it might look pretty cool. Maybe I'll take that back. My dad found this one. It's got a whole bunch of little clam and oyster shells through it. So definitely the most shells, most fossils we've seen. But no horn corals on it. So the layering of the calcite on some of these is just beautiful. You can get some nice patterns and colors. And look at that one. So I'd almost say that if you wanted to come out here you're better served if you just kind of look for nice calcite banding and stuff and get some nice rocks that way. Kind of like the banded onyx over behind Mount Nebo. So yeah you're probably better off finding those. Oh my goodness. I've been on a dry spell for so long with the horn corals and I just saw this. Oh wow it's got three in it. This is the best thing we've found all day with the horn corals. Oh my gosh. I just saw it as I was filming for the other things. Here let me get the macron for you. This is really nice. Here it is with the macro lens. Look at that. Okay and here I'm sitting going I've got spray bottles. Why am I not spraying these off for you guys? There you go. See look at that. Look at those horn corals. And yeah look at that. Okay if we can find more rocks like this that that is worth coming out here for. Look at those horn corals. Yep let's find more of those. And here it is. Beautiful one I found and I cut it up. Let's take a look. Oh that's beautiful isn't it? Yeah you can see four corals in there I want to say. And here's some more calcite that looks really nice. So there is a lot of good good calcite up here with nice bands and zoning from all the different metals and minerals. And here is that piece of calcite. Let's take a look at it cut open. It's pretty nice. Definitely needs to clean up a little bit but overall that's not bad stuff so yeah there's some nice calcite out there with patterns and banding that's worth keeping. This is something I was hoping to find is I was hoping to find horn coral on a larger rock so I could get a better feel for how sparse they are. So you see we have one here one here and I've looked all over the rest of the rock and I can't find any others. I mean there might be some on the bottom but so far as the top and sides that's it. So they are pretty spread out or at least tend to be and that is part of the reason why it's so difficult. And this I barely even spotted this without spraying it off so they are very hard to spot so they could be a lot more plentiful than I'm thinking. It's just we're having a hard time seeing them. So you kind of have to get down close and quite often spray things off to be able to really see them. So I found this rock right here that was cracked that I saw that on it right there. It wasn't as easy to see without spraying it off but I saw it. So I came down saw it saw more on it so I broke this section off and you've got a few coming right through right on the edge of this but the rest of the rock nothing. So the end piece that I had ended up having quite a few different pieces that had lots of fossils in it so I broke it down and cut it into several pieces. So let's take a look at each of these. Nice this one didn't have much inside but the outside looked nice and we found this piece and then this one very nice. And this piece I decided not to cut. I liked it the way it was and decided to leave it the way it was after I'd broken it off. What a beautiful rock. Look at all those dendrites in the calcite. That's beautiful. I do have a smaller piece of this that I'm going to try and cut. Hopefully it looks great. Look at that piece. Oh you want to know how big it is? There's my foot. It's pretty big. So this is the nice piece I kept. As you can see it's got some nice dendrites and stuff going through it and it had a fracture going through it in two places and when it fractured look at the texture it had. And then here look at that cool texture and all the dendrites going through it. That is pretty neat and this is definitely iron oxide so hematite. And I'm going to go ahead now and maybe cut a bit of this just to see what it looks like when it's cut. And here it is cut open. Oh that is pretty stuff isn't it? Look at those dendrites and banding. So this is a really nice rock and this just goes to show how hard these things are to see. So you look at this rock can you see anything in it? Any corals? If I get closer, closer. Do you see that? And that? And those? See? Coral, coral, coral. They're hard to see and that's part of the difficulty if you come out here. They are few and far between and they are hard to see. So just keep that in mind if you want to come look for this stuff. But look at that. That is beautiful. I wish this section right here was sitting on the side of the hill. I'd just take that. But I think I might search the rock. Oh there's some corals there. Okay I'm going to try and maybe break that edge off. I can see some corals there. Okay I broke the edge off. There's more corals going into the rock and this is what I got off. That's nice. This is pretty nice. I don't know how well you can see that but we got two corals there and another one there. So I'm going to try and bust off more pieces. This was the only piece that ended up looking good. So there we've got that one. Nice. Okay I just got to show you this. So I found this big rock right that had all these corals on it and look over here. Got some corals on that one too. Oh and here some little corals. Oh whoa it's like every rock I look. Oh there's a little one there. Wow. Hey and there they're everywhere. So we've downsized most of the pieces and got them into the bucket. I got this one I just broke off. It has some nice corals right here and here and here's the other side of it. Look at that beautiful one right there and you got these other ones all through it. Some of them are very dark and that's probably part of the reason why we haven't seen them a lot too. Look how would you see that? So it's the white ones that you can really see. Here's the first piece. So after breaking them up I decided to leave most of them as they were broken and when I cut them some most of them didn't turn out. So we're just going to go through these rapid fire and just take a look at each of these. But yeah most of them are just broken because that's the way they ended up looking better. Here's the next one and look at this one. I like this one a lot and that red line of iron really helps make some contrast. And this one here's the other side of that one. Yeah it broke almost perfectly in half and this one and this piece and this one and this one and this piece and this one. I do like this one a lot. This piece this piece and this one. This is the other half of that one and this nice little piece and the final piece. Look at this. So many in this one and it's so pretty. It's just beautiful. Well we're all packed up and ready to head back home. I got everything in the vehicle. So I'm doing my videos differently now. I'm going to give it a shot where I'm incorporating which you've already seen. I'm cutting the rock and incorporating it in the video as I find it. I've seen a lot of other YouTubers do it and I thought why not give it a shot. So I'm going to try that. So by now then you've actually already seen all the pieces and it's actually turned out really good. That last little hall we got there really nice beautiful stuff. And that was just right there where we found all that. It's just right in there. So yeah come on out here and enjoy it. And this was just an old mine where they used to quarry limestone and look what we found. It just goes to show there really is treasure everywhere.