My historic single cretaceous barnacle from the Starkville area is Arcoscalpellum withersi Collins which was collected in 1970 with Dr. E.E. Russell’s fledgling undergraduate Historical Geology class. That class also included Michael Bograd and David Dockery that went on to much greater service for the Bureau of Geology with the State of Mississippi and later with the Department of Environmental Quality. Dr. Russell gave us these instructions” What we are looking for looks like a little dugout canoe. You’re not going to find them by just walking around you have to get low to the ground maybe on your knees.” He was right. Not only are these small but the same color as the chalky outcrop. I found several but he let me keep this specimen. I didn’t know why until years later I decided to identify it. I then realized I got to keep it because the pointed tip was broken off on one end. At the same time
I discovered that this fossil was a new species when I found it. It was not named for 3 more years until Collins and Mississippi’s Fredric Mellen published their classic 1973 paper: CIRRIPEDES FROM THE UPPER CRETACEOUS OF ALABAMA AND MISSISSIPPI, EASTERN GULF REGION, U.S.A. This paper includes the following acknowledgment:
The writers are greatly obligated to many people for assistance in the collecting, preservation, and study of the cirripedes covered in the present work: to Professors Troy J. Laswell, Ernest E. Russell, and Donald M. Keady of the Department of Geology and Geography at Mississippi State University for assistance in collecting and encouragement of student participation, and for affording a repository for barnacle collections and literature in the Dunn-Seiler Geology Museum.
I could have lived next door to the gully where we went to fossil hunt in 1970 and never noticed these odd-looking little fossils less than 1 inch long. But we learned on that day that all fossils have a story to tell (big or small), some more than others. When this barnacle lived about 70 million years ago there were giant sea turtles and even bigger mosasaurs that swam past this little bottom-dwelling guy every day and also never noticed him. But because he somehow got broken maybe by a wandering cow, he wound up with an amazing history and his own blog page.
