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I’ve been busy hunting, but I got behind on posting..I’ll try to get back in the habit. Yesterday I made quite the trek around various parts of DFW. I’m a semi-professional drummer, so I had a gig at 11:30am, which gave me a short amount of time beforehand to swing by an eagle ford exposure around highway 360 (Tarrant County). The recent rains adequately eroded the ground, revealing a nice 15 inch petrified log. I suspect this is the coal zone that I find nearby at other locales, because the log has some parts that appear burned. I should have grabbed an initial in situ pic, because the end piece (not pictured) was broken but in place just an inch or two away from the larger piece, you could just tell it had been broken for a long time. I’ve had issues with previous pet wood pieces from this zone warping or disintegrating after a few weeks, so while this piece is solid and heavy, I might coat it with a polyurethane spray, since that has worked well on my other pieces. After my gig, I went to a Fort Worth formation construction spot, finding a few big macrasters but this one had been picked over like bugs off the back of a gorilla (I’m always looking for new analogies), so almost no ammonites. I then went to a nearby Paw paw spot that my accompanying friend knew about, finding my first micro fossils, some nice echinoids, gastropods, and over 100 little ammonites, I believe the mantelliceras species. My friend found a shark tooth, which I seem to not be able to find as easily. lastly, we swung by a nearby Goodland formation spot in northwest Tarrant county, with the usual broken oxytropidoceras ammos, plentiful heteraster and hemiaster echinoids, and a few nice gastropods and one perfect clam. I am including a nice big Goodland formation bivalve fossil I found a few days ago, just to show it off and keep it in the same category. We are expecting a lot of rain this week, so I’ll be resting my back and planning my next targets!

My family is a blended one. I have a daughter from a previous marriage and my wife has 3 from hers. So daughter #3 was expecting her second child any day and my wife flew out to North Carolina to assist her by taking care of their 2 year old son. The return home date is undetermined...which means my schedule has a wee bit more flexibility for a few weeks. On Thursday this week I dropped daughter #5 off at the airport to go hang out with her sister, daughter #4, at Vanderbilt in Nashville, TN. Now my schedule was wide open. I started charging camera batteries and packing a twofer trip. The New Moon was Monday but overcast and the waxing crescent moon sets earlier than the Milky Way Galaxy rises. Win-Win scenario. I packed my fossil gear as well. Daytime fossil hunting, nighttime astrophotography. Oh yeah! I left around 1 PM and arrived at the first stop around 330 pm. Victor's Reef is the name of the spot. Funny how everything looks way bigger than on Google Maps. It's kind of a unique formation as you can see in the sat photo. The big concretions are in the meter and a half diameter on average. Then there were a few smaller ones. I parked in the pull out and took a few pics. The angle was steep with some cliff drop offs. So hiking down wasn't an option to start my day with. I drove south to the end of it and hiked down the eroded slope. Much easier. I walked around and saw plenty of footprints and broken small concretions in the volleyball size or smaller. Lots of calcite veined interiors, not much in the way of fossils. Quite a few inchnofossils on the surface. Looking north. Looking south. My Honda Element for scale. Some really big concretions, right? And then while staring at the ground for fossils or small unbroken concretions....I look up . Hello old car. I did not discern the make or model but my guess is a Chrysler product from around 1963. The engine and tranny were missing so it didn't take much guess work that some bunch of American boys towed the car into the desert and shoved it off the cliff. I found it on Google Maps after I got home. The heart is where I parked and the small rusty brown rectangle is the car just above the the other marker. I scaled the hill right past the car, checked it out, kept an eye and ear open for rattlers and climbed on out . Very steep, frost heaved loose dirt and gravel, tricky ascent. I used the broken concretions parts embedded solidly as foot steps and hand holds when needed. Checked the box for this location. Most of the concretions were calcite veined. I had earmarked a number of sites to check on the way out to the highway as daylight was burning. Right at the top was a split concretion of the jumbo category and had this embedded in it. First time seeing anything like this. My guess is petrified wood. The science behind the concretions is that something organic is the "seed" and catalyst to get things started. Shells, bones, wood and the like are common. Ofttimes, the concretion are just calcite veined with some obscure itty bitty organic bit of something. I didn't crack any open. This one with the wood in it is 1.5 meters and many hundreds of kilograms in weight. Not today. Nope, moving on. As is obvious, this place is vast. I have been hunting on the opposite side of the piece of real estate for several months and my research says ammonites are found all around the perimeter of what this pic shows. The interior of the image is Morrison Formation, The Cleveland-Lloyd quarry and dinosaur fossil bones of unknown quantity. The opposite side is a view of the Book Cliff Mountains. The distance is 25 miles from where I'm standing. This is the Sat photo showing the large fossiliferous valley. The Morrison Formation is quite evident with the pinkish and grayish banding making an upside down Vee. Time to check another spot. I parked and checked out some eroded drainage ditches. Now I'm on the right track. I stepped into the ditch and see this piece with Inoceramus oyster fossils. And then started to see concretions. I flipped or rolled all of them over to check for ammonites or keel exposures. And that's when the finding started! Most were either partials or close to whole with a plethora of large outer whorl sections. WoooHooo! I'm in pay dirt now! And another... And a scorpion underneath the next one. ...and another one... An Indian Paintbrush...parasitic desert plant with beautiful stunning bright red flowers. And another partial - huge chunk with a well defined keel. And another one...actually this was the last one. It weighed over a hundred pounds and kicked my fanny getting it 50 yards over hilly, sagebrushy, cactus filled and ditches to cross. So I came up with Plan B. I hiked another 150 yards back to my car and grabbed the beater tow strap to make a harness. Well that worked for another 50 or so yards before the light bulb came on. Steve...bring the car to the ammonite...not the ammonite to the car. Back to the car, careful navigation over the desert terrain and Voila! I'm there. It was still pretty tough to get it into the car. I can lift a hundred pounds as long as it has handles or a weight bar to grab. A big unwieldy rock is another story. So I shorted the strap, made two loops to put my arms through like suspenders, then grabbed the strap tied around the rock with my hands. Hands, arms, shoulders, legs and back all working in sync and it's on the front floor board. Holy Moly it was a beast. I chugged down the electrolyte drink and headed south for the night time adventure. This one measured 21 X 15 X 10 " inches thick. On the way down further south into the desert I was rewarded again with The Belt of Venus. A celestial phenomena (also called Venus's Girdle, the antitwilight arch, or antitwilight) is visible shortly before sunrise or after sunset, during civil twilight. It is a pinkish glow that surrounds the observer, extending roughly 10–20° above the horizon. And once I was set up in the desert, I took a 2 hour nap from midnight to 2AM. Then captured the Milky Way Galaxy for almost 3 hours, then slept another 2 hours when my wife on East coast time 2 hours ahead of me starting up the "Good Morning!" texts. The trees are blurry because this is a single exposure with the star tracker, mounted between the camera and tripod, is a geared device like a clock which mitigates the spin of Earth to keep the stars from trailing during a 2-3 minute long exposure. In Utah we're spinning about 783 mph / 1260 kph. At the equator, about 1037 mph.

The previous thread posted was filling up and I needed a short break. The Castle Dale Museum was a nice treat as this was my first visit any of the towns along highway 10 which runs north and south on the west side of a huge Morrison Formation where the Cleveland-Lloyd dino quarry is located and endless locations of Cretaceous, Triassic and Jurassic fossils are found. These fossil locations are mostly treeless as you see in my photos so that surface finds are only a matter of walking through the formations. People think there are "secret spots" to find the best hunting grounds for big and small game, rocks, minerals, rare plants, fossils, etc. Nope...nearly if not all land has been walked on by humans. Those who hunt fossils in Utah talk of such places and In my opinion these "secret spots" or " honey holes" are only such in their own minds. Today's tech just using Google Earth mapping will find anything you look for. Crashed airplanes- simple. Morrison formations in Utah deserts...way too easy. Fossil concretions are quite visible from satellites looking down into Utah deserts. Not to poo-poo on the idea myself, people ask me all the time where I caught such a huge fish. I say I caught it in the mouth. They persist and I say in the water. They get the point and we have a laugh. Then I will share a location with them. They ask what bait. I say 'bread', they say, 'Bread?', I say bread, they repeat, 'bread?', I say yes, like a sandwich. Again the light bulb comes on, we laugh and I tell them that every source of Utah waters has big fish like this in it and most people feed ducks at those water sources. Fish are under the ducks eating bread, too. This applies to fossil hunting in Utah...where did you find that? In the desert. Between Green River and Salina or Moab and Price or even in Salt Lake City. Then I say fossils are under your feet. However, giving away your favorite spot isn't smart collecting because someone has already been there. But at the moment it can be your "secret spot" and productive site. Utah certainly has been fossil hunted for over a century continuously. Off the soap box, back to the trip which thus far has allotted me 4 hours of sleep in two days. Lets go, Steve! Here's my "secret spot". Thanks to Landsat/Copernicus imagery. The banded Morrison Formation is easily seen from space and the Cretaceous formation is like the pie crust around it. The Jurassic National Monument is also known as the Cleveland-Llyod Quarry. You can google it for more. Keeping the honest folks honest. Once I parked among the other visitors, I checked it and the gal asked if I had a park pass. I showed her mine. She sees the "Senior" diamond shaped emblem on it and says, no, that's not your card, Yes it is, here's my license to go with it. She smiling, no way you're that old. Yepperdo! I get in free and we had a nice, fun , chat about retirement, thinking good thoughts, loving life and making the most of it. The daylight caused many reflections on the glass cases. A bone in a jacket. The most touted Dino next to the Utahraptor, the Allosaurus. Say Cheese! Outdoors is mile and a half trail and the other building covering the 'big pile of dino bones'. This model seemed quite well constructed. Upon exiting, I noticed we were also leaving the Morrison formation. See any concretions? See any now? When I was close to entering the Park site, I noticed a couple getting out of the van with buckets and a pic. Well, methinks there's a blatant clue. Be sure to dial 811 before you dig! Upon driving back out of Morrison formation back onto BLM land and Cretaceous sites, I noticed the same vehicle still there over an hour later. But the couple weren't visible. I turned down the side road, stopped , put on my hat and greeted them. All went well and they welcomed me to join them. I offered to move to another site and they still welcomed the company. I showed them what I had found the day before in another town outskirts and they had not seen trace fossils here before but the guy knew that meant tunnels, burrows, footprints. They actually had bird tracks from that place in the beginning of the other thread with the snow on the summit pass. I found a nice trace fossil right away and gave it to them to get their bearing on what to look for. They were excited and the gal found 4-5 quickly and was very pleased with them. They had been at this location several times and were about to leave but suggested I search the hills and into the washes and ditches. I helped lift a huge concretion into their vehicle and they did the same for me as they left. Bending down to lift their concretion I saw this piece under his foot. I did take a few pics but enthusiasm won out as it always does and the picture taking falls to the wayside. A pic of his find. A pic of mine. ...and more... The Heavy. I'll get the bucket contents sorted ASAP and add those. Gotta apply some generous amounts of CA to some pieces. Steve PS - Oh, I early forgot! While I was at the Nat. Park I was traipsing along with a family, mom, dad and twin boys. The boys talked fossils the whole trip according to the mom. They were from Georgia and were going to the Natural History Museum in Salt Lake the next day before flying out. I said your boys will love it. It's like a 100 of this collection. One boy asked was this a fossil - holding a polished rock. His mom said it's a rock, I said , yes it is, but it could be a fossil gastrolith. A what? the boys exclaimed. Gastro= stomach, lith = rock. A stomach rock. Dinosaurs swallowed rocks to help grind and digest their food, just like birds do. But if you stop by my car on the way out, I'll give you a for real fossil each. I gave them my Birgella sp. gastropod fossils collected the day before. They were happy.

As the title notes, I went hunting ammonite fossils in the hills above the Salt Lake Valley. This location was shared with me from a retired paleontologist I contacted last week. Mike Foley had posted one of his science papers, Bulletin 78, about ammonites in northeastern Nevada where I visited not long ago. So after receiving the GPS coordinates via email I planned the trip early this week on Tuesday, April 2nd. Once I found a parking spot off campus in a residential hiking trailhead area, I grabbed my backpack with hiking stix, two hammers and a chisel and off up the hill. 1.25 km later I was a mile above sea level and on track to locating the outcrops containing the Anasibirites beds. My first find was pretty old but not fossil old. Turned out to be something I recognized instantly. A large caliber, black powder cartridge rifle, spent bullet. When I got home I took a few minutes on my laptop to refine my guess. A 45-70, 500 grain bullet produced first in 1884 for the Springfield model 1884 known as the "Trapdoor Springfield" rifle. Probably fired from a soldier at Fort Douglas, Utah at of the base of the foothills where I found it in Battle Gulch. Up the hill a little farther was a sure sign I was getting closer to the real target of my hunt. A slightly out of focus ( sorry ) hash plate of small shells. And once I got to the correct GPS coordinates...I found a shark! keychain. Go figure. It was not the last keychain of the trip either. The next was a student's locker key, car key, plastic library card and a carabiner. Both keychains were right smack in the middle of the outcrop beds. And shortly I was noticing many hammered rocks, broken fossils and previous hunters' activities. Here's the cross section pics of the ammonites in the Anasibirites beds. There are approximately 25 ammos in the pic. The view behind me. Downtown Salt Lake, the Capitol, the incinerator smoke stack for the copper mine and in the far background the Great Salt Lake...soon to be the Great Dry Lake poisoning the entire valley's occupants with tons, yes, tons of arsenic blown down the valley with our daily winds. Lots of other toxins will join the arsenic...heavy metals galore not to mention the silicosis crisis pending. Btu enough of that. I collected a few that I could extract from the bed and headed down the hill. This was about halfway down... fossil water ripples. I stopped to get my hiking stix out for the steep descent. Right when I stopped looking south down the valley and set the backpack down, I noticed a mule deer antler shed right at my feet. Nice parting gift. Looking back up the hill at the outcrops of limestone. A panorama of the valley. It was a beautiful day as seen in the pics, a few ammos to prep and a great conditioning hike to get me ready for a busy summer. Steve

Like the title says... it's a bit on the crammed agenda for only two days. But not if you don't sleep. lol! Old people don't need all that much sleep anyway, so I've found out. Tuesday the 2nd of April I was up in the foothills above Salt Lake City checking out the Anasibirites Bed in the Triassic Thaynes Formation. Wednesday, I'm packing up my camera gear for a session of astrophotography in The Last Chance Desert between Green River and Salina, Utah. Not only is Utah full fossils, it's also renowned for it's beautiful dark skies at night...but only way out in the desert. We have light pollution like anywhere else in the urban environment and just an hour or two we have Bortle Class 1 dark skies. The scale goes from 1 to 9, 9 being like Tokyo and1 being in a desert, ocean or unpopulated, unlit location. Fishing, Astrophotography and Fossils are my big three personal interests among many others. Wife and family are always first but balance in ones life is also a good thing. Enough rambling. Packed the gear for fossils and stars, food, drink, personal safety gear, eye drops ( gotta have it in a dusty desert ) gassed up the Element and I'm off. Never gets boring scenery. Heading over the summit pass @ 7500 feet. First stop was a previous site, Garley Canyon, which was barely thawing the ice and snow with plenty of mud. This time it was dry and I turned in to look for the orange outcrops containing ammonites. Had to visit one of my favorite cacti - Scelerocactus vivipara - the small flowered fishhook cactus. This is an exemplary specimen. Usually BLM land have so many open range cattle that they get squished before growing up. I drove around looking for those orange mounds of possibilities. All the way to the cliff. Not sure what this was besides guessing and worth a photo. Nice, HUGE, slab of inchnofossils, which I left in place. I drove around and did not quite hit the spots where the orange outcropping were to be found. The website I researched had been posted back in 2009 and with time the jeep trails were much rougher and washed away. I also had a timeline to catch a museum before its closure at 4 pm. This canyon and the orange outcroppings weren't going anywhere and miles to go before I don't sleep this night. Second stop is a rockhound mecca. Septarianville also known as the Dragon Egg Nest. Supposedly the only location with red interior septarian nodules. The more common variants are yellowish calcite interiors. We have a nice yellow one and my wife gave the green light for a nice red one to go with it. Here's the turnoff sign. I go down the gravel road a few miles and spot the sign...hmmm.. the sign is a little worse for wear than the online pic and the site is deserted. No tents, no big excavator, no tourists/visitors. I called the number - no answer. The web says open until 8 pm. I'll be following up on this later. They probably have a summer season only. IDK. The site courtesy the big eye in the sky. What the red ones look like. There is online a blogger's site where he drove one mile past this site to find large ammonites in concretions weathered out of the hills nearby. So I find said hills and start checking out the likely spots. It's a dead end road with hills...I couldn't miss it. And I didn't. However there are a lot of hills, ravines, climbing and hiking around and the concretions are few a far between. In fact, I'm not seeing any at all. So on to the next hill. Ahhh! I see a few which have been hammered open. The usual suspects inside. Bivalves, gastropods and some evidence of small ammos. I checked every broken concretion carefully, as I had found at other sites that more than a few keeper fossils were overlooked. Not this time. Just lots of crumbled concretions with many being calcite veined only and Inoceramus bivalves along with gastropods were all I found. Where were the reputed "large ammonites" ?!? Here's a sample of the few concretions found. In the center of this piece I noticed a olive shaped smooth fossil shell. With a little, lite taps I and put this & another into my empty bucket. I believe I found samples of Birgella subglobosa or B. burchi. Not sure. Daylight was waning and I had 50 miles to get deeper into the desert for the evening under the stars. Along the hike back to my car. I noticed a few surface finds of trace fossils. I collected the first one. The sun set in the west as it does and in the east a celestial phenomena occurred; The Belt of Venus appeared. It only lasts a short while so my image captures were spontaneous cell shots out of the window as I drove. On to the desert astrophotography destination. An early evening image before the Milky Way rose in the wee hours between 2 and 5 AM. Jupiter, Orion the Hunter and the Pleiades are heading south for the summer. And the Milky Way season is ON! A rare mud puddle added some interest in the reflection of the stars. A short nap between 12 and 2 and then between 230 and 5 I captured many images of the Milky Way galaxy. Afterwards, another short nap and back to the fossil hunting. First stop, the Castle Dale museum, second stop the Jurassic National Monument, third stop meeting new friends and sharing the excitement of finding amazing ammonites. I also have an interest in ancient American pottery and craft replicas of this type of pottery using locally found clay, slips, organic and mineral paints, primitive tools and outdoor firing techniques used by those original potters. This specimen is from the same location where I collected mine late last year on one of my earliest fossil hunts. And I'm going to post this now to not overload the thread with MB's of images. Next up is the Jurassic National Monument and a few pics of the ammonites found after visiting the Cleveland-Lloyd dinosaur quarry. Steve

Large limestone outcrops along trails . Beautiful park and views.

On Wednesday, October 12th, I took another trip to a nearby favorite spot of mine that I found a few years ago which exposes the Sciponoceras gracile Zone, Camp Wisdom Member, Upper Britton Formation of the Eagle Ford Group here in Texas (Late Cenomanian-Early Turonian, 92-95mya), and had probably my best hunt from this site, including several different ammonites, a few shark teeth, my first Enchodus, and 26 Ferroranina dichrous crabs! First find was this very nice Yezoites delicatulus (Scaphitidae) ammonite A very worn Ptychodus sp. (Ptychodontidae) shark tooth: Sciponoceras gracile (Baculitidae) ammonite, namesake of the zone: Dead modern Procambarus steigmani — this crayfish is endemic to northeast/north central Texas: Legs of a Linuparus sp. likely L. grimmeri (Palinuridae) spiny lobster: Metoicoceras geslinianum (Acanthoceratidae) ammonite: Pair of Inoceramus capulus (Inoceramidae) bivalves: Some of the 26 total Ferroranina dichrous (Palaeocorystidae) crabs found during the day: Selenite crystals: Opuntia macrorhiza (Cactaceae), as a botanist this genus is one of my focus groups: Cameleolopha bellaplicata subsp. bellaplicata (Ostreidae) oyster occurring here as overwash from the younger Turonian Arcadia Park Formation (89-91mya) which is otherwise long since eroded away in this area: Next into some things I decided to take nice camera photos of (and consequently some of the best finds of the day) A nice tiny Cretalamna appendiculata s.l. (Otodontidae) shark tooth: My first Enchodus (Enchodontidae) fish tooth, I’m not sure which species are known from the Britton: cf. Margarites sp. (Margaritidae) gastropod, the first of this family I’ve seen in the Britton: A very beautiful Ptychodus anonymus (Ptychodontidae) shark tooth, found while crawling on the ground beneath a slope: Worthoceras vermiculus (Scaphitidae) ammonite, the nicest one I’ve collected: Natica sp. (Naticidae) gastropod, this species is extremely common in much of the Britton: Ferroranina dichrous (Palaeocorystidae) crab: My first Nannometoicoceras acceleratum (Acanthoceratidae) ammonite, fittingly tiny: Another Inoceramus capulus (Inoceramidae) bivalve: Hesperotettix speciosus (Acrididae) grasshopper: Really interesting preservation on this Ferroranina dichrous (Palaeocorystidae) crab that I had never seen before, these are almost always found in orange to dark red concretions: The total Ferroranina dichrous haul: The Nannometoicoceras acceleratum after some cleanup showing the distinctive tiny, conical umbilicus and tubercle arrangement:

Can someone help me see if it is an aptychus in the stone or something else? Many thanks. I actually have no idea how to recognize. Any tips are appreciated!

The Ammonites of Madagascar are globally renowned, with numerous well-preserved genera and species. However, I've never seen one of these specimens in an unpolished state, as most are heavily polished. Does anyone have a photo of these fossils in a more "natural" condition?

It has been a busy past year for me and realized I had not posted some trips from last year so will post a few pictures from my travels. The 2023 spring trip for beach combing down the Alaska Penninsula did not disappoint with glass floats recently washed out by winter storms ready to pickup. There still are glass floats present there that get exposed from past burial by storms, just need to be the next plane by to find and pick them up. The Alaska Geographical Society had another field trip in Denali National Park hosted by Dr. Pat Druckenmiller on dinosaur tracks. I previously posted the trip so will share just one picture. My wife and 3 dogs made a road trip to the end of the Kenia Penninsula to look for plant fossils. I made acquaintances with @Sjfriend getting some tips on where to look, THANKS! We ended up hiking northwest about 2 miles during low tide from Bishop’s Beach, seeing lots of coal and plant fossils eroding out of the beach cliff face. Kilo in the foreground with 11 year old Kobuk back from checking out a Bald Eagle, Cook Inlet by Homer, AK. Kilo tagging along on the first trip fossil hunting. I got three trips into the Talkeetna Mountains hiking last summer. Finding this intact Pseudophyllites indure was worthy of preparation. I took the local rock club president on the second trip as a thank you for cutting a flat surface on the bottom of the P. indure. He was pleased with finding several nice ammonites. Gaudryceras tenduiliratum. One of the few ribbed ammonites present that make it easy to identify. Inoceramus with most large ones in worse shape than this one. As it turns out you don’t have to go far to find fossils around here. Some have shown up in my wife’s flower garden. The third trip was fantastic in that I found another prep worthy ammonite. Not this one, too big for my desk. This beauty, a combo of ammonite and bivalve clams with petrified wood and worm tubes present. Tentative ID Pachydiscus sp. with Inoceramus sp. associated on the ammonite. Difficult for me to get the species as there are subtle differences among the multiple Pachydiscus ammonites in Alaska. Now to the Brooks Range on a sheep hunt which I had previously posted a photo essay on the trip. Coral fossils were abundant, almost everywhere you looked. l Dall sheep left to grow older. Trip into the western Alaska Range with Kilo. Fall colors in the mountains, blink and you will miss it. Lasts only 2 weeks in early September. Kilo with ptarmigan catch of the day. Last trip before freeze up in middle October was shared with one other fishermen evidenced by the tracks. Many of my trips include fishing and hunting with bonus fossil hunting depending on the geology of the areas I’m in. Hope you enjoyed as I have big fingers and have little patience with typing this on my phone where the pictures are and spell check changing the ammo names. Uggh!!! Winter just around the corner.

Found some pyrite ammonites on Charmouth Beach. They are soaking right now in acetone. Need to get something like Paraloid-B72 or Paraloid B-67 which is unavailable here in US. All I know is that the equivalent needs to be hydrophobic. Any suggestions?

Kinda late to start up a long post about my trip today...so I'll just say it started like this . A bit more snow that expected. Crossing the summit @ 7500 feet above sea level. Back in January there was much LESS snow than this. I was hoping the downhill side was nice and dry. It was...turned out to a beautiful day with 63 F degrees before a front blew in. And the trip ended like this...the juvenile raptor sculpture is about a meter tall and the adult is about 2 meters. Looks to be made of CNC cut 3/16ths or 1/4 inch mild steel. Probably waterjet cut. Pretty cool. The toe claw suggests it's a Utahraptor, but with a T-Rex head? Stay tuned...I'll fill in the trip tomorrow.

I finally went over to a slow-moving construction site that has been in process for weeks, if not longer. With little hope due to a lot of bigger rocks being hauled off, I walked along the elevated slopes of plowed dirt and smaller rocks that remained. To my surprise, I found some nice Fort Worth formation echinoids (holaster and macraster sp) and some small ammonites of the mortoniceras sp. I also found a very well fed nautiloid, I’m nicknaming Fat Boy Lloyd (you know, respectfully like he’s a rapper). It weighed in at 5 lb 10 ounces! I thinks it’s paracymatoceras species given the visible lines that are very close together. I also found what I think is a nicely ornate trigonia clam. Tarrant county, Texas.

Been a few years but finally back into finding fossils!

I finally got back some of my prepped woodbine/eagleford ammonites, conlinoceras tarrantense, and I’m really happy with how they look! I collected all of these, and my friend Mercer prepped them for me. I need to get a reminder on what he used to coat them. One of them has a lot of sandstone but most have nice calcite. First 3 pics are the same one, admittedly the last 2 pics might have 1 that is different, they came back looking different enough that I can’t tell easily 🤣. Ignore the three circled ammonites, the one that isn’t circled is pictured.More to come..

Could someone help identifying what this is? Its a bit bigger than a shoebox and weighs about 30 pounds. Thanks in advance. This is from the woodbine btw as well as the ammonites ive included.

I was thrilled to find 9 woodbine ammonites today in eastern Tarrant county, TX, but what made it even better is that more than half were found at a locale that I found on my own. I found 2 very small ones some months ago, but it took this latest heavy rain and flooding to wash the rest out onto a large gravel area where I found them. One looks like it came out of a concretion. My only sadness is knowing that I can’t go back every week and find the same haul! All were either underwater or laying in the open except for one that was partially exposed in loose gravel.

Nine years ago I published pictures of several fossils cast in bronze. I cast other fossils in the last years. I'm happy to show you some of these.

I’m still stuck on my “deep dive” in the Tarrant formation lately, adding a few more small ammonites, some pet wood and some nice plates of turritella. Tarrant County TX

Best of my ammonites 2.0 reloaded. I decided to redo “ best of my ammonite” thread because my old thread is a little outdated. I have given so many of my ammonites away to friends that it seamed strange been called my collection . Also I have found some new , older finds and gifted ammonites that I have never shown before so it should be entertaining. I hope you don’t mind seeing a few duplicates in the next weeks post. I will post 3 specimens now and a couple of more every week. My dyslexia is very time consuming so this thread will keep me busy to Christmas and beyond. Thanks for looking Bobby Promicroceras British Lower Lias, Lower Jurassic Ammonite Cluster "Marston Marble" from Marston Magna, Somerset, England. U.K. Pleuroceras salebrosum? Cleeve Hill Not a bad Ammonite from a rare location. Cleeve is the highest point both of the Cotswolds hill range and of the county of Gloucestershire. U.K. A cool piece A Gyrosteus fish bone and a small Dactylioceras from Sandsend Whitby U.K.

Yesterday was my first outing of 2024 to go south into some of Utah's beautiful deserts. There were two stops, one of collecting and the other for scouting the terrain on a canyon outcrop. Mounds Reef in a word is fossiliferous. it is roughly a 125 square mile area of Cretaceous period sedimentary layers of the Juana Lopez formation filled with fossils. And the Morrison formation of the late Jurassic period is right next door. Since the early morning was still frosty I did some scouting around on side roads that my Chevy would struggle with but my recently purchased Honda Element AWD, higher clearance vehicle got me where I was going easily traversing some eroded ditches and washed out portions of the dirt roads. Due to the weather I knew that the ground would be frozen and any collecting would be predominantly surface finds which was fine with me since the fossil bearing concretions which had weathered out of the cuestas were just sitting there...by the hundreds wherever one stops. These concretions were from lemon sized up to 2 meters in diameter. I was hunting the bowling ball sized which could be cracked open with a standard rock hammer or with one of two others in my kit...a 1.4kg and a 2.7kg. The drive to the destination involves a mountain range crossing and the summit is 7500 feet above sea level or 2286 meters. What it looks like and what it feels like. Yeah, that's kinda chilly for fossil hunting. But after the descent it warmed up to balmy 25F and by the time I headed home it was a toasty 48F. Looking southeast with the Book Cliffs in the background. The lichen covered rocks are always a pleasing find. These ones are easily hundreds to thousands of years old growing less than a mm per year. These are one of the three common type - crustose lichens. Moving along...here's the center of a weathered out and naturally split open concretion. Some have fossils and some fill with calcite veins around something miniscule. This one reminds me of a septarian nodule like I have on my hearth from a rock shop, all polished and nice. This would probably look nice displayed after a polish job. Here's one of the gargantuan concretions still embedded in the Ferron sandstone layer. You can see the natural split across the center. When it weathers out in a few hundred years it will roll down the hill, drop off the cliff and bust open to reveal its contents. I'm looking for the smaller low hanging fruit. My hammer and glasses are just barely hanging on to a crevice by the pick. A few miles down the well groomed BLM gravel road I stop at my destination. Again the Book Cliffs are in the background. By now it's close to noon and warming up nicely. I have on three layers of undergarments, fleece pants and a cashmere sweater with military camou pants and a down jacket and a beanie to top it off. Not long later I removed the fleece pants and jacket. High altitude desert climate with low humidity feels much warmer with the UV rays cooking everything. Plus the brisk hiking and hammering has warmed me up. If one looks closely the frontside of these formations are mostly devoid of concretions with the exception of a few large ones. Whereas on the back side the ground is covered with them. This large broken open concretion down in front has a stack of 3 ammonites in its center with the "knuckles" showing nicely on the top specimen. I gave an exploratory whack or two beside the fossils and realized quickly I would be admiring this only. A rock saw or jack hammer would excavate them but power tools are not allowed...only surface collecting and manuals tools like geology hammers, shovels and picks with any holes dug being refilled. Moving on the back side where the concretions are pretty much "pick how big you want to split" ...one or two whacks with the rock hammer, or get out the bigger hammer and swing hard. My experience from last year's trips tell me that the larger sized concretions have a greater potential for larger sized bivalves and ammonites. Anything larger than a basket ball is beyond splitting easily. So out of 25-50 on the surface there may be 10 prime concretions. I was being very picky on this trip. This one looked promising. And it was! First hit and I see something I immediately recognize. The unique flat keel and smooth sidewalls of a Placentaceras pseudoplacnenta ammonite; from late Cretaceous period. Wooh Hoooo! A bit more matrix removed confirmed my guess. A few more delicate taps revealed more. And then a second one appears! Whaaaaat ?!?!? I certainly wasn't expecting that. The second ammonite of the same species was hidden right under the stack of bivalves in the bottom right of the above image. Not even a clue that it was there. It was time to stop whacking and start packing it for the trip home to do the prepping. Part Two ... coming soon. Steve

I have had great luck finding fossils in creeks and wild places, but this afternoon was my first construction site success (other than Grayson nautiloids and a few shoe clams), and the first success I’ve had in northern Johnson county at a Mansfield construction site. I barely lifted this into my trunk and the car immediately lowered by a few inches. lol! I like creeks because erosion isn’t only visible for a few days until a big slab covers the entire ground, but it sure is easier to find ammonites by the curb..when they’re right there! If only I could have a cell phone alert for active tractors in the Tarrant Formation..

Hello everyone! Like most Europe, here in Bulgaria the winter is also very warm. Today we had 16C with totally clrear sky, so I decided to go hunting on a placed I was gathering info. 150Km from Sofia to the North, is the village of Belotintsi. There is a small Gorge formed by a creek "Nechinska bara" and the outcrops are part of Jurassic of Bulgaria. My source was the National history museum of Sofia and some publications of professors found online. The initial goal was to observe mostly the area as I was little tired for climbing and not properly prepared in terms of equipment. The whole area around (Border with Serbia, Stara Planina Mts, Golo Burdo Mt close to Sofia) were the bottom of Tethys sea. Here is a general aspect of the locality. Next time I plan to go to the upper part of the formation (Oxfordian). Pictures numbered from 1 to 4 show some spiecements on the field. The rocks are rich in CaCO3 as they highly react with vinegar. The stones are easily separated with very light blows. Picture number 1, I think I forgot it there Pictures Sa-Sd: Macrocephalites versus or gracilis I think. Se: This big fella, sadly found in pieces. I believe it is a different spieces to Macrocephalites. Probably it was detached from a formation above. Sf-Sg: Some fragments Sh-Si: I gathered these only to try testing with preparation process. As a novice, I do not want to ruin something nice that was preserved for million of years due to lack of experience. Hope you like the pictures. None of the fossils are museum quality; nevertheless I really enjoyed the day. Wish to everyone happy and fruitful hunting trips! Regards, Dimitris.

Hello to everybody! I'm kinda new here, but before I start I must say I really love this forum! It has really great vibes and you instantly can tell that this is a good and friendly community! So, I am ziggycardon, I live in Belgium, close to the border of the Netherlands and when we start speaking geologically, I live on the same cretaceous sediments as where the first major Mosasaurus discoveries where done! Unfortunatly I have never been on a fossil hunt myself and everything currently in my collection was bought or given to me. But I hope to change that soon, as I am dying to go hunting myself. Maybe the Chalk sediments 3 km from my home would be a good place to start! For the rest, my job, my major hobby and my other main interest besides fossils are living animals. I currently work as the head of terrarium & aquarium in 3 different pet stores and I have quite a collection of reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates and tropic fish myself. In my spare time I often take my own living animals along with my fossils and other educational natural history material to schools so I can teach kids about nature and it's history and hidden mechanics. For the rest are my other hobbies mainly based around movies and televisions as I collect a lot of stuff drom my favorite franchises like "Lord or the Rings" & "The Hobbit", "Game of Thrones, "Pirates of the Caribbean", ... And I also attent a lot of comic cons and other events related to those franchises. But then this topic! In this topic I will show my collection of fossils (and also minerals, stones and meteorites) as it is right now and then I will highlight each group of fossils bit by bit. I am currently starting with a own specialized fossil room, so ofcourse the progress and end result will also be posted here! And ofcourse when something get's added to my collection, I'll show it here as well. Sometimes a photo of my "special" pets or taxidermy specimens might pop up, but this topic will mainly be about the fossil room and my fossil collection. For the rest, if you have any comments or questions about the collection or about me or about anything, feel free to ask! I'd love to reply!

Another hundred or so prestine hemiaster and heteraster echinoids, some foldy and rough shape oxytropidoceras of various sizes, and my first complete engonoceras ammonite. I almost forgot the hamite. I like the cylindrical shapes of the gastropods, too. Not bad for 1.5 hours on a cold day. South Tarrant County, Texas.