I'm looking to identify a trace fossil from a fresh-water fine grained limestone collected at Milpitas Wash south of the Blythe and the village of Palo Verde, California. It is associated with the bivalve Pisidium and the gastropod Physa (both Mollusca).
Can you take a photograph with low-angle illumination? It may help.
Ricardo
Charles, this may not be a named trace fossil, but it is certainly interesting. It appears to be a feeding trace made by an appendage or appendages leading out from one place, which means that the tracemaker could have been larger than the width of the individual branches. I suspect that the maker was bilaterally symmetrical, based on the rough symmetry of the trace on a SW-NE axis, but the symmetry isn't good enough to be entirely convincing. If you have additional specimens, that would help; patterns can't emerge from one specimen. -- Incidentally, if you suspect that a deposit-feeding bivalve is the maker, then you should consult the literature on Hillichnus lobosensis. That trace is a complex burrow that incorporates locomotion as well as deposit-feeding, but you might gain insight from it. Another source would be Schaefer's famous book on North Sea actuopaleontology (Ecology and Palaeoecology of Marine Environments, Irmgard Oertel, trans., and G. Y. Craig, ed., Chicago, 1972).
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