Hungry Hollow, Ontario
In the summer of 1988, I went back to Michigan to visit my parents and help them sort through 26 years of accumulated
household goods in preparation for my dad's retirement and their planned move to Colorado. While I was there, we decided to take a
break from the drudgery and make a fossil-hunting foray into nearby Ontario. My sister had taken a geology class at the local
community college and received a map showing how to reach a location called Hungry Hollow, near Arkona, where many invertebrate
fossils could be found, and my mom and my aunt had collected some nice horn corals there about ten years before.
My mom is the one who taught me to love fossils. My dad, a physics professor, is only mildly interested, but is always a good
sport and comes along. We loaded up the truck with collecting paraphernalia one bright, hot day, crossed the bridge at Port Huron
into Sarnia, and began to follow the map.
We took a few wrong turns, and had to do a little driving around before we finally came to the Ausable River and the spot on
the map. Here the river has cut a gorge through Devonian marine strata of the Widder Beds, Hungry Hollow Formation, and
Arkona Shale. The Hungry Hollow Formation is a grey limestone and the most productive unit for fossils. The sides of the gorge are
steep, and you do most of your collecting by sorting through the chunks of rock that have weathered out of the slope and lie on the
narrow bank of the river. If you are really ambitious, you can chip away at the limestone with a rock hammer, but we found it to be
much easier just to look for specimens that had already weathered out. There are so many of them that it's really not worth working
for the ones remaining in the cliff.
Horn corals (Zaphrentis prolifica) are by far the most common. They are typically a couple of inches long and quite
well-preserved, showing the details of internal septae on the big end of the "horn". Brachiopods
(Mucrospirifer arkonensis) also weather out of the Widder Beds above and tumble down to the river. These are an elongate, winglike form, and are usually missing
the "wingtips". Crinoid columnals also occasionally appear, but make up a minor element of the fauna.
We only spent a couple of hours collecting that day. For one thing, the heat brought on one of my killer migraines. All I had
with me was some aspirin, which is pretty impotent against a migraine, and I tried to splash cold water from the river on my face to
abort the headache, but to no avail. I had to stop hunting and go lie down in the air-conditioned car. My mom continued for a
while longer, but in such prolific strata, it doesn't take long (even if you are selective) to accumulate the 50 lbs. of invertebrate
fossils allowed to a non-citizen removing them from Canada for non-commercial purposes. With boxes full of horn corals and a
lesser quantity of brachiopods, we climbed into the truck and retraced our route back to Michigan. It was a nice little break, but a lot
of packing and painting still awaited us.
