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developed specimen has a piece of soft paper between the two
halves. It is rolled up in paper and packed in a pasteboard
carton with protective packing paper around it. Each carton holds
from twenty-five to seventy pounds of specimens. The cartons are
ready for shipment by truck or rail. Each carton is marked with
letter and number, and there is a list showing what is in each
carton. Some of the specimens weigh only a few ounces. The
largest weigh from five to fifteen pounds each. There is a great
economy of weight in these fossils, for most of them are tailor-made,
the stone being closely fitted to the plant inside of it. Unlike
most fossil specimens, each nodule really comprises two specimens, a
positive and a negative, and it is an interesting fact that in a great
many cases, the two halves are not duplicates. One half may show
the outside, and the other half, the inside of the stem, fruit, or
whatever
else the nodule contains. With only a few exceptions, bark
patterns, each specimen consists of two split halves. [unsigned, but in the handwriting
of] George Langford, Sr.
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| The great
incentive to collecting has been the occasional discovery of an animal
form. None of them are common, although some of them are more
common than others. It took about fifty days of hunting to find
one small, winged insect, and over one hundred days to discover a fine
insect wing. My first beetle-like Elytron consumed over three
hundred days; and a magnificent, giant spider, four hundred days.
Results like these might discourage collecting, were it not for the
fact that the small fossils are beautifully preserved and represent the
first of their kind, as far as is known. But spending four years
of one's life running down a spider is a sad reflection on one's mental
equilibrium. There is so much of the common stuff and so many blanks, that the only way to get at good or rare specimens is by large production. Splitting one thousand nodules a day is a fair average. But knowing what not to split often is my greatest aid to production. Many blank nodules look promising, and splitting them open is just that much more trouble for nothing. [unsigned, but in the handwriting
of] George Langford, Sr.
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