Next to cleanliness, Kirk believes discipline makes for a happy quarry. Splitting a big slab and showing the results The first part of the assembly line includes the Leaf Whackers who tease slabs of rock out of the quarry with pickaxes and crowbars. Fossil leaves come in all shapes and sizes, and this has important implications for how the first part of the assembly line must work. You can find a small leaf on a big rock, but you can't find a big leaf on a small rock, so Leaf Whackers on quarry duty make an extra effort to extract the largest possible blocks. This usually takes a team effort.
Splitters show off their first find.
Depending on the type of rock in the quarry, Leaf Whackers assigned splitting duty use rock hammers, chisels, or even putty knives to split the slabs and look for leaves. Fossil leaf preservation varies from faint impressions that a leaf was once there to exceptional quality in which the leaf's smallest veins are still visible. Good preservation is invaluable to paleobotanists because it helps them better identify the fossil species. Fossil leaves yield other clues to ancient landscapes. In fact, the most instructive leaves are often the ones that emerge with battle scars, namely from the battles they lost.