The collecting crews arrive. Paleobotanist Howard Schorn (right side of image) directs professors and their students from a Community College and a university to the staging area near famous fossil leaf-yielding locality, Lygodium Gulch, Ione Basin, western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Amador County, California. Everybody was eager to get down to business at the fossil leaf site nearby. And we were all treated to a glorious warm, sunny autumnal day in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada--perfect moderate temperatures for comfortably finding loads of paleobotanically significant fossils in the Middle Eocene Ione Formation, some 45 million years old. Image taken on October 26, 2002.

Please note: All fossil localities in the Ione Formation of Amador County, California, presently occur on private property; explicit permission from the land owners must be secured before collecting fossils there.