| Eager members of the FarWest Geoscience Foundation explore the remarkably fossiliferous chocolate shales that gold seekers of the mid to late 1800s left behind at the Sailor Flat hydraulic mine. Practically every chunk of shale removed from this outcrop yielded complete and fragmental leaves and seeds from a roughly 48-million-year-old subtropical forest similar to a Mexican Elm-Liquidamber forest which grows today in the vicinity of Mount Orizaba, Vera Cruz, Mexico. |