I’ve been wanting to check out some of the construction sites in Eagle Ford areas in north Texas, but most of those are well north of Dallas. I’m 60 miles southeast of Dallas, so I’m not often willing to drive that far to scout sites, most of which probably won’t have anything anyway. But yesterday, I had a doctor’s appointment in Dallas, plus needed to make a shopping stop in north Dallas, so I decided to do a little scouting further north. It was to be just scouting, and I wasn’t dressed for any actual fossil hunting. I had on shorts and sandals, and didn’t even bring my hat. But, don’t you know it, I brought home fossils.

One of the construction sites was on a hillside, so the grading done to level it went deeper there, and I stopped to walk a little of it. I found a rock that just looked like a piece of concrete, but I’ve learned that some of the Eagle Ford fossiferous matrix looks a lot like concrete, so I routinely waste a lot of time picking up concrete pieces. There were no visible fossils in this rock, but when I turned it over, it looked like gray sandstone on the other side. That told me it wasn’t concrete, and every time I saw another rock that looked like it, I picked it up. Sure enough, one of the rocks had a small tooth so close to the surface, I was able to pluck it off the rock with my fingernail. Here is that tooth.

Of course, I’m aware that not all material at construction sites actually comes from that site, but the spot where I found these rocks looked to have been graded, but nothing else, so I really think these rocks are from this spot, uncovered by the grading. I ended up picking up five rocks, and carrying them home. I soaked them in warm water, to clean them and see how much that might soften them. They remain very hard, so removing fossils from them isn’t going to be very easy. I’ll add to the post later, to show what I extracted from them, but here are the rocks.

This side view of the biggest rock does the best job of showing their makeup. You can see the dark gray sandstone on the bottom, the brown sandstone in the middle, and the concrete-looking harder matrix on the top.

This view of the top of that same rock shows several teeth, above and below 170 on the ruler, above 140, and above 20. All of the teeth I see in these rocks are very small, more similar to the teeth I found in the Kincaid formation in East Texas than what I’ve found in Eagle Ford. And the matrix the teeth are in is attached to different rock than I’ve usually seen in Eagle Ford. Perhaps these photos will tell some of the experts in The Fossil Forum what part of Eagle Ford I was in.

Here are the other rocks. You can see several teeth in this one. The biggest is just to the right of the ruler.

One tooth visible on this one, above 90.

Nice teeth visible on this one above 100 and below 160.

Nothing I can definitively say is a tooth visible on this one, but I suspect they’re there. I’ll post more after I’ve retrieved some teeth from these rocks. Not sure how easy that’s going to be.