These three trilobites are Flexicalymene meeki from the Upper Ordovician Corryville member within the Maysville group of the Cincinnatian series.  The smaller two on the left were the largest enrolled individuals collected during the excavation of two particularly unique blue grey shale layers within the Bushelman Quarry in Sharonville,Ohio. They were both found by a friend of mine Doug Benton that I was later obliged to have.  The larger arched enrolled Flexicalymene was the first trilobite that I ever really found complete, and I think that it is the best one that I ever found.  It was discovered at a well known historical site east of Cincinnati known as Stonelick Creek, which has since become part of a park.  I was taken there on a field trip when I was taking Paleontology at the University of Cincinnati during my junior year.  The teaching assistant walked us to the creek which had a road crossing that we had come over to park.  We walked to the downstream side of the crossing and then we were told some things about the site.  I learned that a rare aglaspid had been found there by a student who donated it to Dr. Ken Caster who was still at U.C. at the time, although Dr. David Meyer was teaching paleontology then during his first year there. Though I did take classes of Historical geology and Plate Tectonics from Dr. Caster who retired soon afterward.  After the orientation was given, the assistant headed downstream with the class.  I was not impressed by the float rock within the stream, so I decided to head upstream by myself, and after walking beneath the road crossing, I soon saw a low bank on the other side of the creek with some bedding, so I decided to walk across the creek through the shallow water covering my feet over maybe a 30 foot distance to the other side.  As I began to approach the far edge, I saw the enrolled trilobite lying within the water amongst a lot of small pebbles.  I picked it out of the water and turned it over to find that it was complete. Afterward I looked at the exposure, but that was the only trilobite that I found that day.  I did come back to the creek a few times and found a thin layer with occasional prone Flexicalymene trilobites that were nice, and on one of those days my friend Doug Benton uncovered an Iocrinus subcrassus crinoid colony further upsteam within a cutbank on the other side of the creek, which would be another story.  The lengthy crinoids were in place, smothered by sediment during a storm, with an enrolled 8 inch Isotelus maximus trilobite snagged within the stems. There were also two Flexicalymene trilobites within the colony, each with one or two Trematis brachiopods covering the head, one over an eye. I have never observed trilobite carcuses with inarticulate brachiopods on them, nor such an example of rapid catastrophic burial within the Cincinnatian as I saw that day, as between the three of us that were present, we excavated the crinoid assemblage which was about three feet wide from the shale that afternoon.  The large Flexicalymene shown here that I found in the water near the edge of the creek I later showed to our teaching assistant when back on the bus, and his jaw just dropped.  Dr. Meyer had recently acquired an ultrasonic bath which he allowed me to use within his back office to remove the remaining sediment that adhered to the exoskeleton, as the shale within the trilobite is rather hard and completely insoluable.  Since the ultrasonic cleaning worked so well, the trilobite has never been touched by an air abrasive machine.  So considering that this was my first complete Flexicalymene meeki trilobite, and my first found trilobite, and that it was lying in a creek bed among some gravel within a half foot of water, it seems as if it should not have been able to be found in that way. Nothing else has ever been found like that for me.

This is the largest Isotelus maximus trilobite that I have ever found and it is also from the Bushelman Quarry.  I was taken to the quarry initially during a Saturday field trip while attending Miami University of Ohio in order to obtain a master's degree.  Dr. Roy Rinehart taught biostratography, and the class primarily consisted of Saturday field trips.  There were also a few field trips that I was taken on by my Sedimentology professot Dr. Wayne Martin.  He was the student that found that aslaspid at Stonelick Creek believe it or not, and his story was that Dr. Caster looked at it on site when he found it, and remarked "You don't want this, do you?" and that was how the donation came to be.  But both of these men were influential to my learning in the field.  Little did I know until years following graduation that Dr. Rinehart was in the Battle of the Bulge as cited in his obituary, and that Dr. Martin was on a ship at Pearl Harbor during the attack. I was visiting him at his home, showing him some of the trilobites I had found at Ike's Canyon within the Ordovician of Nevada, and among them an aglaspid that I had found there.  We walked into his home office and I noticed the photos on the wall of the ships and Pearl Harbor.  After then learning that he was there during the attack, he proceeded to tell me all about it over the next ten minutes.  I do not remember many of the details, only that one ship was laden with fuel and was flanked by other ships to prevent it from being hit. He said it would have been even worse if that had happened. But now back to the initial visit to Bushelmans, all of my classmates found a trilobite that day except me.  One of the students named Becky found a complete starfish right side up on a brownish limestone plate atop a small spoil pile of rock within the first ten minutes of our being there. It was about three inches across and and in a perfect inflated posture. She immediately donated it, and if it is not within the museum at the university, it should be as it was beautiful. My good fortune was that the quarry was only about 8 miles from the house I was living in within the suburb of Wyoming outside the city limits of Cincinnati.  I was commuting 30 miles to get to my classes at Miami University.  But I was only driving 8 miles to go hunt trilobites after learning about Bushelmans.  And it is also amusing that I was in grade school with one of the Bushelman girls, and that it was her uncle that owned the quarry.  Well, I returned there a number of times before finding the trilobite layers that were mined, and on one visit, I found this enrolled Isotelus lying near the top of a small spoil pile similar to how the starfish was found. The pygidium was showing, and I was hoping it would have the rest of the body, but as I turned it over in my hand I did not expect to see the head so nicely preserved, and I kissed it. I had seen something similar once, maybe at the Cincinnati museum that had this type of preservation. It is similar to what the old timers found within the butter shales of the Corryville member around Cincinnati during the 19th century.  Those beds have long been gone, as well as some of the highest topographic landforms within the Cincinnnati area, such that the geologic record can no longer be observed as it once was. I have concluded that the trilobite beds excavated during the mining at Bushelmans laid within a tidal channel.  The two blue grey blocky shale units roughly 8 inches thick each, were separated by a one inch calcareous shale layer, and extended approximately a couple hundred feet across the quarry hillside before lensing out abruptly into the massive brown shales over just a few feet on either side, with the brown shales extending another 20 feet further upward reaching the top of the exposure. I think it is likely that similar channels followed along the tops of the highest exposures around Cincinnati, and that they were the means of distribution of the fine sediments which dominate the Cincinnatian shales. I believe that the brown shales evidence the existance of iron, although I have not done an analysis.  The grey shale within the channel is likely devoid of iron as the iron would precipitate outside of the channel.  The fine clay would be left over that would drift into the basin and produce a muck, as it often did I think. And there should then be a sequence of environments proceeding down into the basin with distinctive assemblages reflecting their positions along the gradient. There is some discussion about the fauna at Bushelmans within the thesis I completed at Miami U., but my advisor did not want me to include this interpretation without further evidence. And he also never visited the outcrop to see for himself. Isn't science wonderful.  Now the outcrop at the quarry is buried so no one will evern see it unless it is reexposed.  There is great potential there.

These are the only two complete edrioasteroids that I was able to find at the Bushelman quarry in Sharonville, Ohio. The larger one is an inflated Isorophus cincinnatiensis and the other an uncemented Carneyella pilea, as these echinoderms are generally found cemented to brachiopod valves, as is the case with the Isorophus. At the top of the quarry road leading up to the Corryville exposure, there existed a bench above which the channel was mined that produced the trilobites.  Below the bench were sequences of grey limestones, which I considered to be a Bellevue formation equivalent, that would normally underlie the Corryville member.  At the bench thin grey limestone layers were observed at the top of that sequence with Rafinesquina brachiopods. Above that were the beginnings of brownish limestone beds, which were scattered due to the quarrying. One afternoon though I was collecting with my friends Doug and Phil, and one of us noticed an incomplete Isorophus on a piece of limestone with the brachiopods.  Phil and I began to scour the ground surface along the bench and another couple of broken ones were found. But as luck would have it, we both noticed the inflated edrioasteroid about at the same time, and my proximity to it allowed me to be the one who picked it up.  It was free from the limestone, but has a partial brachiopod that it is cemented upon.  It must have been covered very quickly to remain inflated, as they are predominantly found collapsed.  The small Carneyella pilea edrioasteroid I found one day when I was by myself, within a bank of mostly loose rock that flanked the quarry along it's eastern edge. It was just a loose find, but it is the only one I have ever found.  Above the horizon where the Isorophus were found, there were several thin layers in brownish to yellowish matrix contained the first of the enrolled Flexicalymene meeki trilobites, sometimes being found also within the loose mud.  The layer from which the large enrolled Isotelus maximus trilobite came from was likely from this interval.  The trilobites found here were rich shades of brown and very hard shelled, unlike the ones mined from the channel. Several feet above these layers I noticed a distinctive narrow interval with complete bryozoa as one would walk up the exposed hillside. There I found a large frondose piece of a Heterotrypa subfrondosa colony that I pieced together and kept, and a nice hand sized Monticulopora bryozoa that I left in place, which has a moundlike form that is normally associated with high energy.  Brown shales and limestones continued up the slope of the exposure for about another ten feet before reaching the channel.  The blue grey shale of the channel was exposed one day at the quarry, after some excavation had been done. I noticed the blue grey shale afterward where I found a nice large sized prone individual of Flexicalymene, although it is missing a free cheek. But that was the trilobite that initiated the hand mining of the channel.  It would be sometime before I asked some of the workers if I could pay them to remove the overburden to follow the exposure into the hillside. One of the workers lived in a house next to the quarry.  He offered to do the work, but he would only accept a case of beer for payment. He was an expert using a backhoe or a front loader, and he insisted that he was not only doing it for me, but also for my friend Doug whom he met later. His wife and five daughters used to entertain us in the evening sometimes when we would visit with Pete, as that was what he liked to be called. If not for the Morgans, the channel excavation would have ended once the overburden exceeded four feet without the heavy equipment. Pete and his family would surface collect the mined exposure and find many of the smaller trilobites that were within it, as the size range varied from babies to adults within the channel layers.  Until then they had never noticed the trilobites at Bushelmans.  Pete lamented once about how many trilobites were excavated by him without knowing they were there. I did bring him a nice sized Calymene from Yellow Bluff a few years later after I'd moved to Oklahoma, which he kept in a curio cabinet.  His wife offered to return it to me after he had died, as I visited her often on my trips back to Cincinnati from California years later, but I thought it should stay within their family as a keepsake.  I remember visiting Pete and his wife Betty when he had that trilobite, and I would say with tongue in cheek "Pete, where did you get that nice Diacalymene" as I used to call them.  Allen Graffham called them that also, as he believed they had been improperly described. And it would not surprise me if he was correct. He was the leading authority on Oklahoma fossils back in the day.  Below is a photo taken of the channel before excavation had to be considered.  After this the layers were mined about 20 feet or so into then hillside.