Great balls of mud!

The very first time I went rock hounding in Kentucky I came across an interesting looking pile of rocks. They were piled at the base of a sheer cliff made of shale rock. Looking up, I noticed they were eroding from the face of the cliff, and falling to the ground. If nothing else, I thought it was pretty cool. Being from Florida, I’m easily impressed by mountains.

The rocks themselves didn’t look all that impressive to me, but they intrigued me. They were just brown, almost smooth, and shaped like a potato. I picked one up, and could tell from the weight that they probably weren’t geodes. They were way to heavy. I almost left them there, but I felt like there was something special about them. By now I had to find out what they were, so I grabbed a five gallon bucket from the bed of the truck and filled it to the rim. It didn’t put a dent in the pile.

A few days later we were finally home in Alabama with a load of fossils and rocks. It was a few more days before I had time to think about the potato shaped rocks. I cleaned all the other fossils first, and that took some time. This was the same trip that we found the two faced rock. You can read about that in one of my earlier posts.

Back to the story. I took one of the rocks, which I picked at random, and cut it down the middle. My little saw cut it smoothly, and when I looked inside I was pleasantly surprised. In the middle of the rock was a shape that looked like the fossil of a long ago sea creature. I then cut open another, and was surprised again, I found nothing. Just a brown rock. I cut a couple of more with the same results. I was about to give up, when after about six or seven more I found another. It was even more evident to me that it was a fossil. Of what, I had no idea.

After cutting the rest of them, I ended up with maybe fifteen good fossils. I did realize how lucky I was to find one on the first cut. If the first three or four were duds, I most likely wouldn’t have cut anymore for a while. I suppose at some point I would have gotten bored one day and would have cut them open. Who knows how long that would have been before I would have made the discovery.

I still had no idea of what I had, but the next clue was about to present itself. After cutting them all I decided to polish them and see how they would look with a shine. As I began the polishing process on my wet polisher, the rock began to heat up some. With the water from the polisher and the increase in temperature I began to smell something, and growing up in the swamps of Florida, I immediately recognized it. It was the smell of swamp mud, and I then began to believe that these were fossilized mud balls that had trapped some early life form inside. Trapped forever.

Now that I had a pretty good idea of what they were I had no idea what they were called. I began calling them fossilized mud balls, but I didn’t feel good about that. They had to have a name and I was determined to find out what it was. I began looking at a lot of web sites and asking a lot of people. I did learn something about geologists. You can show the same fossil to four different ones and get four different opinions. It can get frustrating.

A couple of days ago, while not looking for them at all, I ran across a picture of the exact fossil. I finally had a name, and boy was it a cool name, dragon stones. There were some other names that they were known by, but in my humble opinion none better than a dragon stone. Side note. The one that I ran across was being sold on Reddit, and they were asking $400.00 for it. Claiming the fossil inside was a sea cucumber. I can see that. Don’t panic, we have three or four just like the one they showed and I believe we are asking thirty for one. We’re trying to keep it real for you.

I now knew that they were called dragon stones, but that didn’t really answer the question. What the heck are dragon stones? Having a suspect made the question fairly easy to answer, and it’s time to nerd out a little. Dragon stones are exactly what I thought they were. Basically a fossilized mud bubble with a nucleus. The nucleus can be just about anything, but in Kentucky it’s usually a fossil from the Paleozoic era. Examples of those fossils are brachiopods, trilobites, corals, and other marine life. These are some of the oldest animals on earth, somewhere between 300 to 450 million years old.

Their technical name is septarian nodules. I did find that there is some disagreement amongst the scientists if they are concretions, or fossils. I’m not an expert, but I feel like they are both. They are made up of different minerals, one of which is new to me. It’s called Marcasite. It has a metallic shine when polished, but it’s not metal at all. It’s actually a crystal. I believe that it’s also called white pyrite. Apparently it is sometimes mistaken for pyrite, also called fools gold. The way the light reflects through the crystal is what gives it a metallic look. We have a few with the marcasite.

I just finished polishing the rest of the dragon stones that we have, and we should be adding to inventory soon. There are a few examples in the store now. Check them out.

I guess that’s about it on the mysterious mud balls. Thank you, and have a good evening. I’ll write again tomorrow.