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I recently recovered this Cameleolopha bellaplicata valve from the Upper Cretaceous (Middle Turonian) Prionocyclus hyatti ammonite zone of the Carlile Shale here in New Mexico. I was initially delighted with its preservation and upon further inspection, noticed a feature on the inside of the valve... ...I thought it may be a blister pearl. I reached out to Dr. Spencer Lucas (New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science) to get his thoughts. His response was: "years ago, we found a Texigryphaea near Tucumcari with a similar pearl in it." Pleased with that response I turned to the interwebs for more information. V. Friedman and A. Hunt (2004) wrote and abstract on Fossil Pearls from the Upper Cretaceous of Texas in which they are reporting Cenomanian and Turonian occurrences...I plan to reach out to Adrian Hunt to get his thoughts on this specimen as well. I also found a paywalled paper on Fossil Pearl-growths written by R. Bullen Newton (1908) in the Journal of Molluscan Studies and have requested access to that literature. Then I turned to our Forum. @LanceH found a pearl in the Kamp Ranch Limestone... ...as did @Mikrogeophagus ... ... @Bobby Rico has a blister pearl specimen from the Norfolk Coast (UK)... ...and @rocket is working on some Campanian Ostrea semiplana pearls from Hannover, Germany. There are numerous threads here on the forum where fossil pearls are discussed. These conversations, along with some modern representation from interweb imagery... ...have led me down an unfamiliar path. My understanding is that these fossils are uncommon. And with all that said, I pose this question... ...is this a fossil blister pearl? I would love to hear your thoughts. Thank you for your time.

Hello everyone! I've been swamped with work, preliminary home building plans and trying to get my collection more organized, but I still managed to pull of a small hunt at Green's Mill Run in this weekend, as well as a short trip to Aurora back in February. I hadn't really made any strong plans for either trip, but a series of different events eventually let to me heading to the area, and the timing worked out in my favor both times. The Aurora visit in February was a quick one; I got up one Saturday morning with nothing much planned for the day, but when I looked into my surplus storage trailer and saw all the excess Hardouinia echinoids and Exogyra oysters that needed to be donated, followed by receiving word there was some special things going on that morning that could have been a decent opportunity to represent the fossil club I am in, I figured it was a good day to visit. After I made my donation and spoke with some folks, I spent the rest of the morning and afternoon digging through one of the piles that was poised to be relocated soon with a local friend. I ended up finding a few nice things! This is a group shot with most of the things I found that day. Only a couple of really big highlights, I was able to find quite a few Trivia gastropods! These are some of the coolest fossil gastropods from the mine spoils that I've found there, and they're really ornate. I was told the last batch of material had a lot of them in it, so I was glad to have found some before they moved it on. And the other really cool find, a Scaphella gastropod with some trace color patterning! I've only found a handful of these gastropods as well, and the fact that it had some preservation like this was really neat. It's not at the Florida level of preservation, but it's really nice regardless. Moving on to the present, I had previously made a few short attempts to locate a modern echinoid that is almost exclusively found in North Carolina, Rhynobrissus cuneus. However, none of them bore any fruit, and with the cost of fuel and lack of time making it difficult to continue taking detours on my way back from other trips, I figured it wouldn't hurt to see if I could attempt to locate someone that wouldn't mind swapping some things for a specimen. Fortune was kind to me, and a very nice lady was willing to part with one she found in exchange for some of my spare finds in my collection! It also included spines, which was more than I was hoping for. After talking a bit, we decided to meet "in the middle" at Greenville, NC to swap the specimen. Knowing I'd be in the vicinity of the site, I packed my creek gear and hit the road for a very rainy hour and a half drive. These are a couple of photos of said specimen, alongside a copy of the official description of the species that the USNM (AKA the NMNH) printed to give out to various institutions. After wrapping up, I immediately went to my preferred Belemnite hunting spot in GMR. However, I failed to realize how much rain had fallen not just that morning, but the night before! It was just shy of 6 foot on the Tar River, and the water was considerably high and rough in that particular par of the creek, which is narrow and steep. I was a bit disappointed in the turn of events, but rather than call it quits I decided to go to the other spot I have hunted at with friends, which was wider and much more shallow. I can safely say I have now learned my lesson with the height of the river's impact on the site, it was still quite rough in that area too! Still, since I was there, I gave it my best shot and got to work on some areas without strong currents. Ultimately, it wasn't a bad visit! I found a few surprisingly nice things, as well as a few finds that I did not expect. Unfortunately, this particular part of the creek is not very good for any sort of mollusk fossils, including my favorite belemnites! They are a bit rarer, and are highly eroded, but I still was able to find one decent quality specimen. The bivalves and gastropods are also more scarce and weathered in this area, so I ended up with fewer invertebrates than I was hoping for. My preferred spot has a higher concentration of Peedee Formation finds, and there are some nice belemnites that have come out of a small 2-meter area. However, this spot is really good for vertebrate material! I found quite a few cool things there, and there are plenty of large bone chunks to be found, such as these. On to my shark teeth, these are all my Squalicorax teeth! These are some of my favorite shark teeth to find, and most of the ones I've found at this Peedee Formation site are much smaller than the ones I found on Holden Beach. Here are some unsorted teeth I found. I'm still learning shark teeth, so unfortunately a lot of my finds are currently lumped together like this. GMR teeth tend to be pretty worn down, so it makes it hard to identify a lot of the specimens I pick up. These are some miscellaneous things I found; the bottom left is a ray tooth, which I don't find quite as often there. The other two on the bottom are probably Enchodus teeth, the middle one is either a heavily worn tooth of sorts or bone fragment, and I have no idea what the top specimens are, though they looked interesting enough to hold on to. On to some of the more exciting shark teeth I found! these are pretty worn down Otodus teeth, but I always enjoy picking them up even in rough condition. This was a fairly large but worn Isurus (Mako) tooth of some variety, about 3.05 cm (1.2 inches) long. It's got a thick root but is somewhat flat, with the edges of the blade flattening out to almost a shelf of sorts where the serrations would be in other teeth. This is my first Hemipristis serra (Snaggletooth) tooth from the site that wasn't a small chunk, and it's one of the largest I've found anywhere! It's missing the root unfortunately, but is still about 2.41 cm (.95 inches) long without it. If it had the root I'd imagine it would have been at least 3 cm (1.18 inches) long. And speaking of large teeth, this is the largest Galeocerdo cuvier (Tiger Shark) I've found there, at about 2.79 cm (1.1 inches) crown width and about the same slant. It was a suprise to find to say the least, I nearly dumped it back into the creek because I didn't notice it at first! It doesn't beat my largest Holden Beach specimen (3.2 cm or 1.26 inch slant), but it's a big tooth with nice color. And for the most interesting tooth, some sort of Lamnidae shark that is missing a root, but appears to be possibly pathological! It's about 3.75 cm (1.475 inches) long as is, but it'd probably be at least 4.445 cm (1.75 inches) long if it had a root. Lacking the root makes it hard to say what it might have been, but it's definitely one of the largest teeth I've found in the creek thus far, and one of the most interesting. And lastly, this is the find that kind of caught me off guard the most: It appears to be, just based off of appearances, a specimen of Skolithos linearis. Not the most exciting trace fossil visually, but it's really interesting to me! These trace fossils were a surprise bonus to my fossil hunts in Surry County, Virginia, and I wasn't really expecting to see something of the sort here. The ones found on eroded cobbles in Virginia along the James River are said to be from the Cambrian Chilhowee Group (563-516 ma), but I'm not really sure what the age of these here would be. From the best I can tell online, they seem to have occurred throughout multiple periods of time in multiple places due to different organisms, but these look strikingly similar to the ones I saw in Virginia, albeit with the cobbles more eroded. I took a picture of the larger one next to a Virginian specimen to compare, and I highlighted the burrows with a red circle on the GMR specimen, as they are very hard to see in pictures. The longer circles are of "side section" specimens, and the smaller ones are from the ends of some running through the center of the rock from one edge to the other. The smaller cobble's specimen is a bit more obvious to see, so I didn't circle it. I haven't been able to locate any information on these fossils occurring in the area anywhere online on a superficial level, so if anyone has any insight into it, please let me know! I'd love to know if these are indeed what I am thinking they are, and what age they could possibly be if so. I might make a post on the ID forum some other time if I can borrow a camera that can take better pictures of the specimen. Anyway, that's all for me! I've got a family trip to Holden coming up shortly, and I may have some interesting opportunities to collect some different NC fossils coming up this spring; I don't have a lot of info on it, but it seems promising. I've also got a return trip to Virginia planned before the end of spring, and I can hardly wait for it!

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.

This partial ammonite whorl was a surface find from my April 8th trip to Cleveland, Utah. In particular, it was the one I found under the foot of the guy I was helping to lift his large Ammonite embedded in a heavy concretion to carry it to his van. I could discern that it was chocolate brown underneath the calcite coating. I stuck some thick felt furniture leg pads on the back of it to keep from scratching my office desktop. Well a week later I decided to remove the coating. Here's the "as found" pic. And with safety equipment including a gas filter mask, gloves, glasses, big bowl of water, a fan and open garage door, I was ready to go at it. The chemical is muriatic acid for cleaning brickwork and swimming pool masonry. I used a toothbrush to dip into a small cup of acid next to the bowl of water. Dip, scrub, rinse repeat until I liked the results. First round on this section. Looks good. Second round. Keep going! I'm liking it so far. Round three finishes that step. Then I soaked it in a bowl of water and baking soda. Several rinse cycles, a good dry time and a coat of Paraloid after that. Then the felt pads were reattached. And I like it a lot more than before. It may only be a partial whorl of an ammonite but to me it's a lot more than that. Kinda like finding a toe claw of a raptor or a big carnivore tooth. It may not be the whole enchilada...but it's enough to think about the potential of what it was complete or once was alive.

So I am 90 percent convinced the site is Austin Chalk Formation. I have found a couple of fossils that lead me to that conclusion, a gastropod and a nautiloid specifically. That being said, I cannot quite figure out what these bacultes are. From the HGMS book the Boehmoceras arculus seems to be the closest but it says it is a curved shaft, which these most certainly are not. But the strong nodes on these are really not falling under any other possibility. Any insights? 3.5 inches 2 inches 1.5 inches this is the only one that you can really see the suture patterns. The nodes don't show up very well but they are there

This weekend I find myself northeast of Dallas, hoping that I might manage to catch a glimpse of Monday’s solar eclipse. I figured while I was in there area I’d try my hand at fossil hunting the Cretaceous Ozan Formation in the North Sulfur River near Ladonia. It’s a fairly famous fossil hunting site which is open to the public, so I was quite excited to give it a go. When I arrived I noticed that quite a few people were in the same spot, some hunting for fossils and others enjoying the water on a cool day. Someone in the parking lot was showing off a huge Scapanorhynchus tooth they had found, which I was able to identify for them. My hopes were quite high, but pretty quickly I realized that the North Sulfur River wouldn’t quite be the fossil buffet I had imagined. Fossils seemed to be few and far between, so imagining that the area near the park entrance was simply heavily picked over I walked about a mile and a half west to try to get to fresher pastures. Alas, the only fossils I netted myself today were Inoceramid clams, some baculites (the red-zone ones, not the pretty black ones) and two fairly large grypheid oysters. Oh, and some petrified wood too. I found zero vertebrates, save for a bone fragment. I don’t fault myself. Although I was not the first to arrive, I was the last to leave. I combed over just about every gravel bar I came across, remembering @PaleoNoel’s advice: “It pays to be thorough.” At one point I walked back to my car to replace my sopping wet hiking boots for my water shoes, and kept on pushing. But it did not net me much. I have to say I’m slightly disappointed. Maybe I’m just spoiled rotten when it comes to fossils having grown up on the Front Range. But I will say, this is the hardest I’ve ever worked for a few crappy baculites. I talked to some other fossil hunters, and most seemed to be having about the same luck I had. But one person had managed to find about a half dozen shark teeth, a mosasaur tooth, very nice black baculites, and a partial mosasaur vertebra. The proof that there were treasures out there to be found drove my persistence, and ultimately amplified my frustration. Perhaps I went at a bad time - a lot of people are in the area for the eclipse and I was told that it had been a while since there had been good flow. Maybe that’s just the way it goes at this site. Nonetheless, I’m considering trying again within the next year. My sister lives in Waco, and I heard that unfortunately the North Sulfur River won’t be accessible to fossil hunters past 2025 due to the removal of the dam that exposed the rock unit in the first place. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful day and it’s always fun to discover new things! As much complaining as I did in this post it is super awesome to find my own fossils from a new rock unit for the collection! I caught a diving beetle too, which I intend to take home and add to my aquarium (I have an aquarium specifically for diving beetles, but they aren’t out yet in Colorado)! Some pictures for your enjoyment:

Hi everyone, This is first time I create a topic, apologies in advance if any mistakes. I am a newbie into fossils And I have been searching for a long time trying to figure it out some ID for this unidentified fossil bone. I got it some time ago and I would like to know if thanks to the knowledgeable members of the forum it was possible to get a closer ID. I know that getting species on isolated pieces is impossible, but I would be happy to get a group, family or closer genus of the type of animal it could belong to. *Could it be a pterosaur (as it has very thin walls that was my first guess)? Or some other reptile or even a bird? How to differentiate? * Is a radius as per seller description? Or could be a metatarsal, phalanx... It is from the Phosphate mines of Khouribga, which seeing the bit of matrix attached looks true. Internally is completely crystallized with a thin bone wall around. I took some pictures of the section. The only information I got from the seller is the following: - Location: phosphate mines, Khouribga, Morocco. - Age: Late Cretaceous 96-66 MYO - Probably radius - Unidentified species Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts! #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6