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Post by stanbo43 on Feb 27, 2012 3:00:30 GMT -5
Morning all, I am not a miner, never have been ( the thought of working under millions of tons of rock scares me to death.) My inerest is in Geology,Fossils,minerals,Spend all my spare time looking for fossils,mainly from the Carboniferous which means ---coal mine spoil heaps. Getting too old (dodgy legs) to be climbing up and down cliffs and quarrys. So I thought --great, spoil heaps should be easy to find!!!! wrong can't find ANY. Not with rocks in anyway,seem to be all sticky clay. So my question is--does anyone know where I can find any of these tips. I live in Howarth --about 10 miles from Bradford, would be most appreciated if anyone can point me to any such tips, Cheers.  |
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Post by John on Feb 27, 2012 7:59:47 GMT -5
The only fossils I ever saw underground were in the shales above the Deep Hard seam, small shellfish, about three eighths of an inch diameter, plus fosslis of "Horse Tails" a kind of primaeval tree.
I have seen leaves in the roof shales of faces, and in some seams you could see leaf imprints.
I'm not saying it's impossible to find fossils in pit tips, but it sounds like a case of "looking for a needle in a hay stack."
Good luck...
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Post by dazbt on Feb 28, 2012 3:33:02 GMT -5
Hya Stan (?), as you are probably already well aware that fossils were found in most if not all of the Yorkshire coal seams, mainly ferns that I remember but also small round leaves as well as tree trunks that had scales. I know that occasionally fossil trees were found standing vertically and that some seams had very real working problems with "mussel beds" particularly in the floor where they were found in large pockets and rather than being bound together were loose within the seatearth and could literally be shovelled up. I picked up a small "whelk shaped" shell at Kiveton Park Colliery in South Yorkshire, it had been fossilised with a coating of iron pyrites, there were also "Devil's toenails" which I remember being told were actually small Nautilus shells. As kids we spent hours fossil hunting, cracking open pieces of the red shale that had been dug from burnt out coal tips and commonly used as hardcore. The difficulty is that all of our tips around Barnsley are now "cultivated" to some extent and I can't think of anywhere that has raw material easily accessable, there must be some opencasting going on somewhere around us or reclamation of old muckstacks. Have you seen the photos from the recent fossil forest found in the Chinese opencast coalmine in recent weeks, apparrently acres of petrified trees and plants still standing upright.
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Post by John on Feb 28, 2012 7:22:24 GMT -5
I wonder if those ironstone nodules we called "dogs bollocks" were large fossils Daz???
Post a link to the Chinese coal fossil beds!!
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Post by dazbt on Feb 28, 2012 7:51:57 GMT -5
Quick link to the latest fossil forest in China, I'll have a look for others I've seen with much better photos; www.bna.bh/portal/en/news/496092the photo here is just like some of the 'scaly tree' fossils in the UK coal mines I mentioned. |
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Post by dazbt on Feb 28, 2012 7:56:43 GMT -5
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Post by dazbt on Feb 28, 2012 8:17:09 GMT -5
I wonder if those ironstone nodules we called "dogs bollocks" were large fossils Daz???
Post a link to the Chinese coal fossil beds!! I don't think they were fossils J, just inclusions, I believe some of the larger ironstone balls in the roof were swirl holes in river beds. I have (or had) an interest in lapidary, searching for stones to polish rather than for a mineral collection so I always kept an eye open for anything different whilst underground, not that I ever found anything of real interest in coal mines, occasionally the odd quartz intrusion and the nearest to anything worthwhile were lenses of poor quality hematite that I did manage to polish up. I once found an almost perfect silver metallic sphere embedded in a piece of coal which I now know was a rarely occurring form of marcasite, after some discussion at the scene of the find it was completly destroyed by a 'test blow' from a hammer.  |
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Post by stanbo43 on Mar 6, 2012 15:49:44 GMT -5
Thanks for all your replies chaps. I have found fossils on coal heaps before,I usually find them in rock nodules which can be the size of an apple or football sized.They are normally plant fossils--ferns --leaves etc. I presumed these where dug out with all the muck to reach a coal seam, then tipped on a heap. I search old lead mine heaps as well, and find minerals such as --Fluorite, Barite, and Galena (lead crystals). But as lead is usually found in Carboniferous limestone,it is Marine in origen so no plant fossils. I have tried to post a picture of a nodule but don't know if it will work.---Cheers Stan. Attachments:
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Post by John on Mar 6, 2012 16:36:35 GMT -5
Thanks for all your replies chaps. I have found fossils on coal heaps before,I usually find them in rock nodules which can be the size of an apple or football sized.They are normally plant fossils--ferns --leaves etc. I presumed these where dug out with all the muck to reach a coal seam, then tipped on a heap. I search old lead mine heaps as well, and find minerals such as --Fluorite, Barite, and Galena (lead crystals). But as lead is usually found in Carboniferous limestone,it is Marine in origen so no plant fossils. I have tried to post a picture of a nodule but don't know if it will work.---Cheers Stan. Nice fossils Stan, rock was also sent out the pit from the two gate roads of a face from what is called the ripping lip, so hard to say where fossils came from, ie road headings or working faces. |
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Post by shropshirebloke on Mar 7, 2012 6:49:26 GMT -5
From what I remember most ripping dirt was used for gateside packs, but the spoil from rock headings was sent out. Whenever possible spoil from dinting and back-ripping was used to pack old roadways, which could involve endless trips with a wheelbarrow...
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Post by John on Mar 7, 2012 7:40:14 GMT -5
We had too much for packs, low faces!
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Post by jakeofwinterhill on Mar 26, 2012 14:08:42 GMT -5
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