In many parts of the world, vegetation covers nearly all the rock, and there are few or no natural outcrops where you might find fossils. In these regions, paleontologists and geologists are forced to use whatever artificial exposures and outcrops are created by road building, construction, and quarrying. These exposures don’t give us as much to work with as the miles of bare rock in badlands, or the miles of coastal cliffs, but they have to do. Some are surprisingly fossiliferous, so you don’t need to cover a huge area to find specimens (fig. 8.1).
Figure 8.1 ▲
A roadcut in northern Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati, Ohio. The layer the student is looking at is filled with large fossil corals that are eroding out. (Photograph by the author)
Quarries and roadcuts are limited exposures, and there are challenges associated with both of them. In the case of roadcuts, the biggest problem is traffic, especially if the road is very narrow. You have to be extra careful working in many roadcut exposures, and it’s often a good idea to wear brightly colored vests or hats in safety orange so you are more visible to careless or inattentive drivers. Most of the time, collecting at the base of the roadcut is fine because fossils often fall down during the rains and accumulate at the base. If you must collect higher up, you should be extra careful about climbing up the roadcut, especially if you might fall down into oncoming traffic. It’s always a good idea to watch out for rocks falling from above as well. Many collectors who work steep roadcuts wear hard hats for protection from falling rocks. Most roadcuts are public access and controlled by the local highway department or state agency that maintains the roads, so permission is not usually an issue. Some, however, are on private land, and you must obey all signs, especially “No Trespassing” signs.
Some of the same problems also apply to quarries (fig. 8.2). Many are steep and unstable, so be careful when working at the base of the cliffs and wear a hard hat. If it’s an active quarry under private ownership, you must get permission from the owner, and safety laws may require that you wear not only a hard hat but also steel-toed boots (as the workers must wear). In addition, most quarries under private ownership will require you to sign a liability waiver, so you cannot sue them if something happens to you on their property. Heavy equipment may be driving around in active quarries, so you have to be extra careful. A giant dump truck or earth mover as big as a building cannot stop on a dime if you step in front of it. Some quarries also have active blasting times, so you must heed any warnings from the workers and be wary if you hear the warning siren before the blast. Even abandoned quarries with no active legal owners can be hazardous because they are no longer maintained. They may be prone to collapse and cave-ins after long periods of neglect, and you should be extra careful in these settings.
Figure 8.2 ▲
Collecting in a rock quarry. (Photograph by the author)
Finally, both quarries and roadcuts have the same problem in humid regions: plants can grow back very quickly if the quarry or roadcut isn’t constantly cut back. In many places, the highway department makes beautiful roadcut exposures, only to immediately cover them up with various forms of plants and stabilization materials so the roadcuts don’t collapse onto the roadbed. In the southeastern United States, collectors have come to hate kudzu, a plant that grows over almost anything if not actively cut back; in the southwest, road crews stabilize roadcuts with drought-resistant ice plants. In parts of the country where rapid active construction for new housing tracts and buildings exposes clean rocks and fossils, you will have only a few months from the time the exposures are made to hunt for fossils before they are covered up again.
If you are an active collector, it is a good idea to join any local fossil clubs in your region. Club members often have the latest information on whether an exposure is good or grown over, where fresh roadcuts have just been made that will soon vanish, and who owns the property rights to important collecting sites.
