does flint have fossils in it?

[paulc]

I collected a small bucket of "flint" while in the Eddyville, KY area.  I tried to cook it this weekend and it pretty much all popped into lovely little sharp as crap shards.  Many of the pieces had obvious shell and marine life type fossils in pockets here and there.  The rock definitely had a "rind" with what looked like flint in the middle before I cooked it.  But the fossils make me wonder now if in fact it was something else.

Anyone know?  TIA, paulc

[cowboy]

Yes sir! A lot of it does have little critters in it. Some of this pedernales that i've picked up is shot full of fossils. Most of the flint down here is associated with limestone - which this is limestone country. Anyway, limestone from what i understand is the product of shallow seas millions of years ago and it's deposits of corals, crustacaians and other such that filtered down to the sea floor.

[Tower]

Here in the U.S. Most of what we call flint is actually a chert or another type of stone. Chert does have fossils in it. Flint may have it also. So it is not uncommon to find shells & other things .

[paulc]

great, so I had the right stuff.  Now how do I cook it in a fire without blowing it up?  I put the rocks I found in #10 cans of sand and just set them on top of the fire...after a bit I had to clear out to avoid the fire hot shards that came flying out in spite of the sand intended to keep it from flying.  This is the second time I have exploded my collected rocks.  paulc

[cowboy]

Haha . Sorry, don't mean to laugh at your misfortune it's just that i pretty much did the same thing once years ago.. Your going about it all wrong. You want to spall out your chert or work it down to somewhat thin, say an inch or thinner. Then you bury it in dry sandy soil around two to three inches deep. thats what you'll want to build your fire on top of. Don't cook all of them at once until you fine tune your process.
 You don't have to even cook it in the ground as far as that goes. Some use a kiln, toaster oven or even their kitchen oven. Usually want to reach four to five hundred degrees for most standard types of chert. I wouldn't reccomend the kitchen oven .

[mullet]

 Most of that Kentucky flint I've been gifted with doesn't need any heat treating. Search back a few pages in this section and you will find plenty of step by step instructions on heat treating. There are several different examples.