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Found with the typical ferns found at McAdoo. Is this a seed (or spore) or just some kind of concretion?

I found this little fern at the North Attleboro fossil site, and I cannot seem to put an ID on it. The leaves seem to be confluent, so i’m thinking maybe a juvenile Alethopteris or some other Pteridospermatophyte

It's been a long time since I've written a trip report. Not that I wasn't hiking, I was hiking like mad and finding stuff. Just didn't get around to documenting in the latter part of 2020. Too much craziness. A couple of days ago, I went in search of an extremely elusive shale formation, that contains some of the loveliest ferns I have seen. My records show I specifically planned 13 hikes last year trying to find another exposure. That was over 100 miles of fruitless searching. Zero. Zilch. Well, two days ago I found another small exposure. Scenic photos of the journey follow starting with walking uphill on an Ordovician rock bed The Ordovician transitioned into this Silurian bed with Devonian formations rising above it on the left Although fairly stumble-free walking this was relatively steep. That day I ascended 2,800 ft with my big pack full of tools, food and drinks. A nice shattered chert nodule in the Devonian. Just to show not everything has fierce thorns here, some 'Cushion Buckwheat'

I recently found several fossil plant impressions inside nodules from Indiana coal mine spoil dumps. It is Pennsylvanian age approximately 300 mya. Please help identify the specimens to genus, and species if possible. Thanks!

I'm going to be taking a drive this year from Pittsburgh to Charlottesville to SE Kentucky, to Knoxville, TN to catch some of the autumn foliage, and was wondering if anyone had any suggestion on fossilized foliage outcrops or spoils piles. I'm trying to focus on ferns and other plants, as I've collected a lot of marine fossils previously and want to get some new types of specimens. I've seen some stuff online about Ambridge, PA and Big Hill in KY, but haven't been able to find too many other public spots besides that. Just wondering if anyone had any suggestions or recommendations. Thanks.

I'm brand new to Fossil Forum, and can't afford the big splashy wall display fossils, so my "collection" is modest, but it's a start. I have three of these fern plates from St. Clair, PA, and two diplomystus fish fossils from the Green River formation in Wyoming.

This is a trip I took last year as we decided to make the trek to Washington DC for our family trip. I would definitely recommend a trip there for the museums alone if anyone has been thinking of going. Even on our non fossil trips, I try to plan a fossil excursion or 2. We got to the site around 11am, and it was quite hot as it is out in the sun. I don't have any pictures of the site itself, but you basically park on the side of the road, and hop over a barrier, and you are right there. Thank you @minnbuckeye for recommendations on parking as safety is always paramount when the family is with me. Thank you to @TNGray for his wonderful webpage once again in helping me find some easily accessible sites for the family. I only got to spend about a half hour at the site as the family was wanting to get moving home, but here's about half the fossils I brought home.

Amazing Nodosaur fossil from Alberta gives up secrets of dinosaur diets. They ate ferns and charcoal. https://phys.org/news/2020-06-scientists-armored-dinosaur-ate-meal.html

Thought I’d make one of these posts on the chance that I end up spending a lot of time posting here. Hey there everyone - I’m Cameron. I’ve used this site for a long time but never made an account until a few months ago. I’m from central VA and travel to the Lost river near Wardensville just to find bits of Eldredgeops, and I’d love to talk fossils with anyone on here as nobody in my offline life is very interested in the topic. I hunt marine outcrops from the Mahantango and Carboniferous swamps in Pennsylvania, and I’m building up a fairly decent collection. Ive found many fossils that I don’t have a clue about, and learning anything about paleontology makes me squeal like a little girl, so I’ll definitely be posting in the ID section a lot! I’ve even found a conulariid in WV which people seem very excited about! I look forward to posting more here, hopefully I did this post correctly.

Sorry to throw all of these at you guys, but my knowledge on plants is pretty nonexistent. If anyone can help with ID’s, I would really appreciate it. I bought them online (there are 14 pairs) and the seller told me they were collected in Vigo county, Indiana. I tried to do a little research on the area and it seems that maybe they came from Chieftain No. 20 mine, but I’m not 100% certain on that. I’ve numbered the photos to help make replies a little easier.

I'm piling back in late from a fossil hunt and wanted to get this online. Found in a lower Pennsylvanian formation locally. Typically find cordaites and ferns in this formation. Today, this odd split pair caught my attention. For size reference the small calamite next to the split pair is a little over 5 cm long and 2 cm wide. Although not a great field shot I'm posting it up now in case someone can point me in a solid research direction. Part of me thinks cordaite but the unusual branching features on one side only are quite odd to me. Perhaps some sort of rhizomic structure? I will post a close-up tomorrow when I have access to natural light again. Thanks for any advice or suggestions, Kato

About a year ago, I took a trip to go collect at Corys Lane, Portsmouth, Rhode Island. Today I was super bored so I decided to finally unwrap and photo my collections! I have a vague idea of some of these, but a lot of them are well beyond my experience. I have positive/negative of two of these pieces. Any input on genera etc is welcome i have larger filesize photos of all these but i had to ensmallen them to fit here

I have been slacking in my posts the past couple of trips, so I figured I would catch up. First up are carboniferous plant fossils from McIntyre Mountain, PA:

This morning I went back to my new friends office to pick up a few more things I didn’t get last time. Very productive trip and I can’t thank Bill enough for sharing his finds with me.

I read @rachelgardner01 's trip report* recently on the fossil forum telling about St. Clair-style white fern fossils and how the ghost town was once again being visited by more than just the most reckless of thrill seekers. Not long ago, extremely few people dared to go beyond the new bypass for fear of falling into flaming sink holes. The place has become unregulated like the Wild West, with tourists coming from all over to see the “Highway to Hell” and ride their ATVs. The fire was reported to have burned out in town and moved down the coal vein. Clearly, no one is worried about sink holes. After a couple hours enjoying every ride with no lines at Knoebels Amusement Park on a very foggy, soggy day, we drove to Centralia for a little fun. What could be cooler than a ghost town on a foggy October day? And, by the way, after enjoying the romantic setting, maybe we could find the quarry. Rachel's trip report included a handy aerial map with the slope marked in red. It was a short walk from on of three cemeteries that are still maintained in town. All we had to do was follow the ATV tracks. We met a microbiologist while we walked. She was looking at the bacteria, comparing soil samples from places where the fire was out with samples from some hot spots above a fire that still exists deep below town (with surface soil temps around 80F). The bacteria present in the hot spots are out of balance. There is an overabundance of the wrong sort. However, in the spots that have cooled down, the balance has returned surprisingly quickly. And, by the way, she had a permit to be there. The town is still considered too unsafe for the general public, but it isn’t patrolled. Two lessons should be learned from this: 1. Nature always finds a way. 2. If the rocks I’m examining seem kind of warm, find someplace else to prospect! We found the quarry about an hour before sunset. We found ourselves at the top of steeply sloping walls covered in scree over smooth, slick, carbon shale. I watched my step, kept my center of gravity close to the ground, and tread carefully. I like sliding down scree-covered slopes, but not when I do it unintentionally. The fossils were plentiful! I saw calamites and lepidodendron all over the place. Some were bright white while others were gleaming gray on matte gray shale. Some had a single fern frond and others were a riot of plant textures. A few were coated pale yellow. The hard part was picking out the nicest ones to take home. I have been to this formation before. I made several trips to Carbondale, to the NE, over the last couple years. I missed my chance to go prospecting at St Clair ( a few miles to the SE ) as they closed the site to all but school groups a few years ago, but I do have some pieces that others collected before they closed. St Clair and Centralia both have the white ferns. Carbondale has the most detailed preservation. The ones there that are colored are yellow to deep red with a few that have iridescent spots. Centralia’s stone is the most crumbly and delicate, especially when damp. Although Centralia, St. Clair and Carbondale are all part of the Lewellen Formation and reasonably close to one another, there is a distinct difference in the stone at each locale. St Clair and Carbondale have firmer shales. I wanted to find things that I did not already have represented from Carbondale. That proved tricky in the short time I had, but I did find some nice white ferns to take home. Plus, I have a plan for another trip at some point with more time – maybe with some simple rappelling gear? Coincidentally, this month’s speaker for the Delaware Mineralogical Society was a geologist who participated in a study of the mineralization of St Clair plants. Here, then, are some of the highlights after I thought to take notes. Time period: Pennsylvanian Sub-period, 320-290 million years old The environment was a swampy area where the sediments settled slowly. The plants were minimally compressed during preservation, so the impressions are more or less the same size as the original biomatter. The silvery-gray material coating some of the plant impressions is graphite while the white is a combination of pyrophyllite and kaolinite after pyrite. When the swamp was buried, the thicker parts of the plants pyritized. Heat and pressure then transformed the pyrite into the white minerals, which settled to the bottom. The upper surfaces retained the carbon and became coated in glossy graphite. So, what one sees loose on the ground are a mix of upper and lower surfaces. *

Got excited by some of the recent (and recently revived) threads on Centralia so I decided to take a ride over last weekend to take a look around. The graffiti highway was packed and there were a few ATVs riding around the dirt trails but I had the strip mine to myself for the afternoon with the exception of a couple families exploring the area that stopped by to chat. It was very warm on the exposure, but I look forward to getting back there as it cools down so I can try to find some premium specimens as the white ferns were just as bright as any I previously saw at St Clair. Here are some of the finds:

Last Saturday, I finally got my chance to hunt for Pennsylvanian age plants from the Pottsville formation in Durham with PAG (Paleontology Association of Georgia). Interestingly enough, the spot turned out to be roughly where I expected it to be, just to the northeast of Cloudland Canyon. After getting there a little late (Ride from Milledgeville to Durham is not short) and figuring out where the rest of the group had parked, I looked towards our search area, and what I saw was promising: Listening to the hammers hitting chisels had me pumped and ready to start searching. About 5 steps in, I look on the ground, and find my first piece of Calamites (no image). Then as I was heading up the hill, I picked this up: My first good frond of the day, and I made sure that it wasn't the last. Already having a couple of nice pieces in tow, I crested the top of the hill with some effort, where I started splitting some pieces with our trip organizer, Hank. While I was there, I noticed that the Calamites bark was very, VERY common here. Some of the splits we made had nothing but calamites bark in them, covering the entire surface area of the split in multiple layers. I also witnessed hank split out an absolutely drool-worthy frond from a large block absolutely full of plant debris. Having not found a frond in a minute, I decided to move to another section on top of the hill. Safe to say, it paid off quite handsomely: Really thrilled with this frond. At this point, I already had racked up quite the impressive haul, but I needed a little something more. After all, It will probably be some time before I get another opportunity to hunt here. After we had split a lot of plates on the top of the hill with spotty success, we all went to the far side of the hill from the parking area, headed in separate directions. I went straight down the hill, with most everyone else peeled to my left. As fate would have it, I stopped just short of the bottom when I ran across this absolute jackpot: Cont.

My wife and I went for an afternoon drive Saturday to see if we could find a few places I had been reading about a couple hours away. The first stop was Mcintyre Mountain, a Pennsylvanian plant fossil location looking through the tailings from a large but long abandoned mine town, like 150 years abandoned. The drive in was a 4 mile dirt road up the mountain. Luckily for us the majority of it was well maintained and the scenery was beautiful.

Hello everyone! Thanks for taking a minute to read this. Heading over to Maryland this weekend for some fossil hunting. I was hoping to get some guidance on some spots in PA. Which we are planning on heading to on Tuesday (June 18th). Would like to know if there are any areas where we could find some plant fossils. I know from doing some research the areas may be limited. It's our first time collecting plant fossils so any tips would be appreciated as well! Thank you!

On a short schedule for searching so it was a mad dash. I have very few ways to easily reach the Pennsylvanian Formations. Ordovician-Silurian-Devonian-Mississippian no problem. Anyway, I've found some interesting ferns in the Pennsylvanian Gobbler and wanted to see what I could find in another location about 3 miles as the crow flies away. About 1.5 miles into the site and a fairly productive morning for an initial search. Not the best of specimens but holds promise. Found this interesting brachiopod panel presenting itself with some glints. It was easily opened up by dragging my long chisel into it Some of the brachs. Not cleaned up yet.. A brach hash plate and the layer the brachs deposited on showing trace fossil depressions. Not cleaned yet A couple of phylloid algal limestone specimens

Hello to all, I just ran across this site, look forward to chatting with others on finding, preserving pieces of our history. I've been collecting fossils from my local areas for over five years, and have donated many of my finds to our coal mining museum in our little town. We grew up playing on the slag piles of strip mines and deep mines and use to throw them rocks all over, little did we know what was inside those precious gems were fossils. I find numerous types of fauna and floral specimens and normally I give them to others to put in museums or historic places...Truly enjoy collecting fossils and our area is rich in these gems... I'm amazed every time I open up an fossil and be the first set of eyes on the amazing find. My bucket list is a Tully monster and someday will find one... So happy there are others that thrive on finding fossils and not just rocks...Thank you..

These were fossils my dad found over 20 years ago I think and gave to me maybe 10 yrs ago. I had completely forgotten about them. My dad use to be a land man for an oil and gas company. So he traveled the area extensively trying to get leases to drill for gas. I believe they are from somewhere near Mansfield, Arkansas from the Atoka or McAlester formations, both of which are Pennsylvanian. Any my help with ID would be greatly appreciated. First Piece The longest blade is about 55 mm long by 13 mm wide. A close up of some of the blades on the left side. I think there are 2 varieties here, not sure if the arching one is like the ones in the center and to the left of it. The center one is the top side of the blade and the one to the left and arching one appear to be the underside of the blades. It’s cool to be able to see that much detail. Then there is a different variety on the top left corner. I’ll take some close ups of those and post in a bit. A pic of the right side a bit closer up. I think in this pic there are at least 3 varieties of ferns. The ones on the top right pointing downwards which may be the same as those on the top left above. Then the long blade in the center running vertically. I think it is the only one of its kind represented on this plate. Then at the bottom running mostly horizontally. I have no clue as to the genus or even group of Medullosans. If I had to guess I’d say Neuropteris for all 3, but it’s a wild guess. Second piece is an Annularia of some kind I believe. You can se the long slender stems and then many long, slender leaves, which appear to have numerous veins running the length of the leaf. They are all cross crossing each other so it’s a bit chaotic to try to isolate one cluster. This is the back side. It has a couple stems running across it. There is more stuff in between layers on both pieces.