More X and More

Walking clockwise (or sun wise) around the Chicken Yard Stone Mound One...

...I wonder, "Is it an eye on a turtle head or a spot on a turtle shell?

Is it both??"

"Where did the chip come from? Is it here on purpose to balance the stone or is it just a chip?"  

Back almost where I started, I could make a convincing musk turtle with a big fat head by moving that "5 o'clock stone" back just a few inches. And is that another broken open stone and that little crystal the head of yet another of those sort of turtle effigies???

xenolith/xenocryst

My new word for the day is XENOLITH.

Yesterday I would have called this "a chunk of some sort of crystal of something in this other stone" ( like I did here: Leominster Familiar Shape), but today I can proudly say that, after a few hours of reading about the geology of Connecticut and getting very confused about terms, I learned this new word at Rock Piles (Bears Rocks, Pennsylvania) via a comment by Doug Watts (who actually knows one rock from the other by name, unlike me, and to whom I considered sending every picture of every rock I've ever taken - for a second or two until I thought about it for a second or two more) .

I just happened to notice the thing for the first time just yesterday because the light rain really makes the colors and details of these stones show up really well...

 

XENOLITH: a fragment of a rock included in another rock

http://mw2.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/xenolith

First Known Use of XENOLITH: 1894 - Rhymes with XENOLITH (I already knew that!)

"A xenocryst is an individual foreign crystal included within an igneous body (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenolith)."

My intention was to photograph these little turtles, split out of stones so the crystal looks like a turtle head sticking out of a shell...

(The turtle with the X-head stone is at about 5:00 from the center of the above photo),

sitting in what looks like the rest of the stone it was broken out of.) 

Here's another, downhill from the other but still on the same mound:  

The two Little (Xenolith) Turtles the first one pictured circled in yellow, the second circled in red, and the much larger Turtly-looking Stone.

Here's a third one above & a fourth below:

And, just because, here's a photo from http://www.geus.dk/cgi-bin/webbasen_nyt_uk.pl?pagenum=12%7Ccgifunction=Vis

of a "Eclogitic mantle xenolith from a kimberlite dyke in the Maniitsoq area, southern West Greenland. Photo: J.Lautrup, GEUS." - whatever that means.



The Little Roadside/Indian Trail Turtle

1934 Aerial Photo: present day property lines added (above), mostly difined by stone rows.

The yellow dot on the 1934 aerial photograph is a large boulder on a zigzag row of stones. The red rectangle is the original tractor shed that was expanded into a cow barn sometime after 1965 since it appears unchanged on the next available aerial photo available online at the Connecticut State Library.

There is an area bulldozed into the hillside, a place to park the hay wagon and unload it into the loft, on the south side of the barn. It looks as if there once was a stone row there where the cow barn now stands and, south of the cut, the stone row remains today.

Above: Looking south east across the present day road, an "Indian trail."

Below: Looking south west, from the road, by the southern edge of the "cut" in the hillside.

Above: the large boulder perched on the zigzag row.

Below:  the Little Turtle by the roots of a maple tree.

Below: a light colored stone in the dark humus from below the others...

Above: "found" position.

Below: reconstruction trials, matching edges and finding a stable position.

Above and below: the numbers.

(nice quartz toenails/claws)

Little Turtle in the rain on Sunday October 24, 2010

Another interesting concentration of stones of a suggestive, similar Testudnate nature.
You never know what you are seeing until you learn exactly what you are seeing - or something like that...

A "just a little bit bigger turtle" a few inches away?
Step back a little and maybe those are more turtles, assigning a culture to the construction of this "stone wall."



a frozen spring, a turtle and a snake

Going through some photos, sorting and organizing, I found this interesting Testudinate Feature. I could tell you, judging by the sequence of photos from January 2, 2009, where I was just before and just after I took these photos, but not exactly where this is. It’s something I just hadn’t noticed before (since the early 1970’s) and the weather conditions were just right for me to capture a glimpse of this possible Carapace Stone and Turtle Head in what has to be a frozen spring since I know no stream flows through the place I had to walk through on that day. I took the photos and then forgot about it. Looks like I noticed a large Turtle as well a possible Snake…