Students from a Community College and a university, along with their respective professors, get down to business at Lygodium Gulch, one of the great fossil leaf-bearing localities in the Ione Basin, western foothills of the Sierra Nevada, Amador County, California. 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 fossil plants from the Middle Eocene Ione Formation. The numerous boxes of paleobotanical specimens recovered here would be used in a project, underwritten by the National Science Foundation, to study the many Eocene fossil floras of the Sierra Nevada region, to try to determine the ancestral paleoelevations and paleoclimate of the Eocene Sierra Nevada. The students and their professors were cheerful, hard-working and dedicated during the field trip, skillfully splitting the feldspar-rich, brilliant white shales of the Ione Formation to expose abundant fossil leaves. 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.