An interesting Hill Country Rock

If you're always looking down when you're outside, it might not mean you're depressed; it could just mean that you are a rock hound like me. I runs in the family. In the ten years we've lived here our pile of interesting rocks, fossils, arrowheads and other finds has grown into an impressive cache of natural history. Now that we have the new hill in Kingsland to explore, I'm sure we'll be adding to it in future years.

The kids found this rock last weekend and they are sure it's a dinosaur egg (dino do?) fossil. The cracks are unusual. While it is a gray boring rock color, its cracks make it unlike any rock we've ever found around here..."Here" being the Hill Country of Texas.

I told them that I'd take them over to the Natural History Museum on the UT campus to have someone looks at it and tell us more. We've done that before with interesting stuff we've found outdoors and the woman we spoke to in the basement level was very agreeable to explaining what she thought our find was (and what it wasn't). Usually stuff turns out to be way more mundane than we imagined.

The color is wrong, by the way. I played with the picture in photoshop and illustrator before posting it here. If you have any ideas about this rock, I'd sure like to know what it is. I'll tell you when we know.

Agate Collage

Ever play with Flickr Toys? Sure you can do this with photoshop too but bighugelabs is quick and easy if you've already uploaded to Flickr. Love you, "fd", whoever you are. (Am I the only one who thinks there's some geek out there with the initials fd? Maybe it stands for some acronym I'm supposed to know. If you know, let me know.)

These shots come from the picture of one agate slice, about 7 by 9 inches. I cropped the one shot 9 times in 300x300 pixel increments at various points around the picture. I rotated one of those crops 90 degrees, too. (A dollar if you can tell me which one.) Really, who needs drugs?

What comes to mind when I see a rock like this, broken open to reveal its innards? I think, where did mother nature learn her color theory? I think, how long has this been here, hidden away like this? I think, how long does this take to make? I think, of course, the inside is the best part. And, maybe I should start going around with a hammer.

I bought the kids each their choice of rocks in the gift shop at the TX Natural History Museum today. Here's what they chose:

Katie -- an agate "healing" necklace
Willie -- a minuscule red agate hippopotamus
Henry -- three uncut rock specimens

If your town has a natural hsitory museum I highly recommend a field trip (with or without kids). I brought my sketch book but didn't really have time and the quiet to sketch as I like, but maybe I'll go back one day. I fondly remember sketching at the University of Nebraska's Morrill Hall when I was a student there. That was when they still had laser light shows at night on the weekends ((dark side of the moon, etc.), but I digress. I'm delighted with our museum experience today. We came home and had blueberry snow cones and everyone's tongue turned blue, like witches. A memorable day.