Digging for Trilobites

After leaving the Great Basin National Park area, we headed for Delta, UT, arriving on July 10. Our reason for this visit was to dig for trilobites at U-Dig Fossils, something we'd been looking forward to since we saw a program on them on the Discovery Channel 4 - 5 years ago. They provide you with a rock hammer and a bucket and guarantee that you'll find trilobites. Turns out, this is a fairly easy guarantee for them to make as it would be hard to not find them in this huge treasure chest of fossils.

We paid for two hours, figuring that would be plenty under the hot Utah sun. Turns out, it was more than enough for Matt, who packed it in just short of an hour and a half after the sun got to him. As you can see below, he refused to listen to us about wearing his hat.

The basic mode of operation was to find or split off a chunk of rock and then split it with your rock hammer. Matt's hard at work here, looking for fossils.

Look at that smile! As you can tell, he was successful. He had a knack for finding little trilobites, although I hold the record for finding the tiniest, as you'll see below. It popped out for me, tiny as can be.
Rob was actually breaking pieces of rock off of the side here and had fabulous luck finding some nice trilobites.

Here are some of the specimans that popped right out of the rock for us. Believe it or not, this picture is zoomed in and my tiny one, on the far right, is actually smaller than it looks in this picture.

A few more of the nice specimans that we found. We also have many that are still in the rock. Evidently, if they're face up in the rock it's better to leave them in "the matrix" rather than to try and pop them out.

It was a hot two hours of work but very worthwhile. I feel compelled to note, however, that there really is nothing else in Delta to do besides hunt for fossils, topaz, and geodes. It's known as a rockhounders paradise and that's about it.