| The author's parents return from a hike north of Little Antelope Summit, White Pine County, Nevada, in search of fossil cephalopods and gastropods in the upper Mississippian Diamond Peak Formation. The Diamond Peak Formation produces one of the largest late Mississippian fossil faunas in the US West, including: foraminfera; corals; bryozoans; brachiopods; gastropods; pelecypods (AKA, the bivalves); cephalopods (numerous species of goniatites ammonoids); crinoids; ostracods; and conodonts (diminutive tooth-like denticles, unrelated to modern jaws, that served to enable food gathering in an extinct lamprey eel-like organism). |