Devonian Fossil Gorge

October 7, 2010
Coralville is to Iowa City what Lacey is to Olympia.  It holds most of the mall and stripmall action for both cities, but it is an actual city, despite local Iowa City thought that it's just strip malls.  One of the neatest things around is the Devonian Fossil Gorge.  The link below is to a short blip about it---if you are more interested, googling will bring up a lot of information.  It is an interesting place to see and we had a wonderful (hot!) afternoon there.

Coralville Dam created Coralville Lake (known locally as "the Reservoir") and the rushing waters of the 1993 flood  exposed this fossil bed.  Flooding in 2007 and 2008 widened the bed, and parts of that widened area have been landscaped to stabilize the area. The original area is being weathered away, so it is constantly changing, but it is impressive to walk on flaking ground and to see all of the fossils.

There is a walking guide to various specific fossils or soil layers, as well as several overlook areas, but it's easy walking.

There are many types of fossils in the bed, much of which is accessibly by walking. Once you get onto the riverbed, it just looks like flat, shale-like ground until you look more closely and then you see fossils everywhere.

This little doughnut-like deelie-bobber is all over the place, always perfectly round, and the overall size doesn't vary by much more than an eighth of an inch. They don't seem to be attached to each other, but often several will be clustered in the same area.

This is about as large as we found...maybe 6-7 inches long.

The area is home to fishing, camping, hiking, boating and swimming. We weren't able to drive to the Visitor Center because they had closed a portion of the road.  It is probably closed in October, anyway, though there were a lot of people fishing and camping and a fair number of people walking the riverbed.
We also saw Ring-Billed Gulls, another first and Jeff and I spotted a marmot but the driver didn't see it.
We've been looking for a cardinal...haven't seen or heard ANY, though we are assured they are usually around "all the tiime".  We have seen huge flocks of starlings in and around the cornfields, turkey buzzards, a few Little Blue Herons (both mature and in their white immature plumage).  By the far the most unusual animal we've seen is a squinny....I am assured this is NOT a ground squirrel or a 13-stripe chipmunk, but I can't find a link that definitely says what it is.  These are chipmunk-sized, but they scurry flat on the ground---they are really fast---and don't hunch as chipmunks do. We haven't seen one sit up, but when they stop scurrying, they still seem flatter than a chipmunk.