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Fort Worth, Texas: Skyscraper with Lots of Fossils

No dinosaur bones sticking out, but countless prehistoric clams and snails are visible in the exterior walls.

Address:
500 Throckmorton St., Fort Worth, TX
Directions:
Downtown. The tower fills the block bordered by Taylor, Throckmorton, W. 4th, and W. 5th Sts. Apparently the fossils are on all four sides.
Admission:
Free
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Visitor Tips and News About Skyscraper with Lots of Fossils

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Skyscraper with Fossils

I saw the post about the limestone used as a veneer on the skyscraper in downtown Fort Worth. The stone used is a common architectural element in Texas. I was a construction manager for Radio Shack and if you visit a typical Radio Shack mall store in Texas you will find the same material used for the store front.

[Rick Kincaid, 01/18/2014]

Fossils.

Skyscraper with Lots of Fossils

One of my hobbies is to look for fossils in building stone. On a recent trip to Fort Worth I spent a couple of hours during a hot summer afternoon trudging around downtown, looking for fossils, and couldn't find any. On my way back to the hotel I passed "The Tower" and was flabbergasted to find the entire perimeter of the building was chock-full of exquisitely detailed fossils.

I damn near broke down and cried.

My guess is that the rock is whitestone lentil, which is quarried near Austin under the trade name "Cordova Shell Limestone." The limestone is from the middle Cretaceous period (105 million years ago) and jam-packed with Trigonia (sort of a clam) and Turritella (sort of a snail). The building itself was, for a time, the tallest in Fort Worth. It was severely damaged by a tornado in 2000, and there were plans to tear it down, but instead it became a bunch of condos. Who wouldn't want to live in a tornado-damaged high-rise filled with fossils?

[John Takao Collier, 01/09/2014]

John adds that the San Jacinto Battlefield Monument outside of Houston, which is taller than the Washington Monument in DC, may be made of the same type of stone. "I didn't get a chance to visit" he writes. "Just as well; I probably would have had a heart attack seeing all the fossils."


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