There are two great lost fossil sites in the Twin Cities area. (The Brickyards don't count; they're not lost, they just aren't open to collection.) One is the Johnson Street Quarry, where workers cut into a bed in the Hidden Falls Member of the Platteville Formation that had unusually abundant echinoderms. As described in Sloan et al. 1987: 200, "Sardeson mined out a spot in this unit in the old Johnson Street Quarry in Minneapolis (now filled with garbage, and covered with Interstate 35) that produced about 20 specimens of the starfish Protopalaeaster narrawayi, several specimens of the crinoid Cremacrinus arctus (Fig. 16.2), edrioasteroids, cystoids, brachiopods, bryozoans, molluscs, and graptolites." This is slightly out of date; instead of a dump, there's now a Quarry Shopping Center with a Cub Foods, Home Depot, and Target, although even with all those options you can't get an edrioasteroid there anymore. Regardless of the exact character of the overburden, it seems unlikely that anyone will be doing any paleontological follow-up there anytime soon. The other locality is the Afton graptolite locality in the St. Lawrence Formation. We already had a post on why this locality was important; what I'm curious about is where exactly it was. A locality, even if "lost", had to have been *somewhere*, and apart from the scientific and historic interest, there very well could be similar fossils in rocks nearby. Indeed, Hughes and Hesselbo (1997) reported graptolites in the lowest strata of the St. Lawrence Formation in their Afton section, where collection may have postdated the road work that destroyed the classic location. For some reason, despite its “classic” nature, nobody ever saw fit to just put a pin on the map. What clues do we have?
