It's been a while, but back in April while we were in Rochester, we visited Quarry Hill Nature Center for the afternoon. It was free admission and they had everything....snakes, turtles, fish, salamanders, bees, birds, fossil hunting in the old quarries...the list goes on and on.
They had multiple species of snakes...here's bull snake.
Who wouldn't expect to randomly find a T-Rex replica skull in Rochester? Luke loved it...
There was a large pond/lake with all sorts of things, Ducks had recently returned to MN...
The turtles had just come out of hibernation and were enjoying the spring sun...
And the nature center has miles and miles of walking/hiking paths for you to enjoy...if you walk far enough, you'll find this small creek...
Several paths go back to the old limestone quarries, the limestone was used for many buildings in the area...basically, everything that is water in the picture below (it had rained a lot recently) was where limestone was and quarried out.
It's in these quarries that you can fossil hunt and take home what you find (though they ask nothing larger than your fist)...Luke really wanted to find a dinosaur, but it took some real convincing that it wouldn't happen. The Limestone was deposited when MN was covered by an ocean and is Ordovician in age, meaning it pre-dates the dinosaurs by a couple of hundred million years....
But there are some cool things to be found, heres where a Cephalopod was until it was removed by someone...
This particular cephalopod was related to and similar to today's squid, some of the real big ones found in MN can be 15 feet or longer...
After Luke realized he wouldn't find any dinosaurs, he realized fossil hunting would still be okay. Here's one of his finds...it's filled with bryozoa, brachiopods, corals, etc.
It's a great park...plus it's free!
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