Here, students from a Community College and a university begin to wrap for safe transport the abundant fossil plants they had found during the final day of the dig at famous Lygodium Gulch, one the truly great fossil leaf-bearing localities in the Ione Basin, western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Amador County, California. Note the rolls of toilet paper employed in the wrapping process. Such a substance is perfect for cushioning delicate fossil leaves in preparation for their eventual transport from the field back to a museum for scientific curation. The student-professor crews had volunteered to help paleobotanist Howard Schorn, retired Collections Manager Of Fossil Plants at the University California Museum Of Paleontology in Berkeley, collect plant fossils from the Middle Eocene Ione Formation. The many boxes of paleobotanical specimens recovered here would be used in a project, underwritten by the National Science Foundation, to study the numerous Eocene fossil floras of the Sierra Nevada region, to try to determine the ancestral paleoelevations and paleoclimate of the Eocene Sierra Nevada. Image taken on October 27, 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.