This Kansas Travel Info Center is a high traffic area offering food, fuel, and rest for anybody who is traveling along I-35. As you make your stop, notice something interesting within the building blocks of the surrounding buildings and walls around the area. The outside of most of the buildings and the walls where GZ is located is constructed with limestone, and within that limestone are many ocean-dwelling fossils.
Fossiliferous Limestone is a sedimentary rock that is formed by the build up of the hard parts of marine organisms. Certain marine organisms absorb calcium carbonate from their ocean environment to make the hard parts of their bodies, and when the marine organisms die, these hard parts collect on the sea floor and eventually form limestone. An example of one of these fossils are crinoids.
Crinoids flourished during the Paleozoic Era and peaked during the Mississippian subperiod, when the shallow, marine environments they preferred were widespread on several continents, including North America. The limestones in North America are made almost entirely of crinoid fragments. The most common crinoid fossils are individual button-like plates that are fragments of the stem of the crinoids.
LOGGING REQUIREMENTS:
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Message me the answers to the questions below.
1. What is the shape of the most common type of crinoid fossil?
2. Examine the Limestone at GZ and locate crinoid fossils. do they range in size? What would you say the average size of the fossils are?
3. Considering that fossiliferous limestone is abundant in Central and Eastern Kansas, what do you think this area was like during the Mississippian Subperiod?
4. can you locate any other familiar-looking fossil(s) within the limestone? If so, what are they?
5. Include a photo of yourself or a personal item near or at GZ
Failure to answer these questions and message me the answers will result in a deletion of your found log. Thank you for participating!