Search the Community

So I recently bought this fish fossil from an antique shop, supposedly, from the Green River formation in Wyoming. The specimen is about 17 centimeters or 6 inches long, I purchased it because of its relatively low price, but most of all, it's quite large! I'm very limited in knowledge of fish, so I figured I would post it here on the forum, any ideas? I'll also add more photos if needed, thanks in advance.

Suspect fish skull is about as specific as possible on this piece? Galveston Bay, Pleistocene.

Collected from Galveston bay dredge spoils, late Pleistocene Beaumont formation. First thought was gar skull fragment but it lacks the central suture line evident in online photos. Hoping someone here might recognize it.

Hi everybody, I am looking for a good and complete Hyneria tooth from the Devonian of Red Hill. Feel free to contact me if you have something nice. I can give good material, I have many stuff from the Solnhofen area and more. Best wishes from France :-) Frederic

Picked this up at a show over the weekend and was wondering exactly what it is and if its real. Is it an Endochus jaw? The host rock is about 7 inches long and the logest jaw piece is about 4 inches long. Thanks! Eric

I found this really cool looking fish which is most likely a Knightia, but it's preserved in ventral aspect. The rear portion of the fish is missing including the dorsal fin so many of the diagnostic characteristics have been lost, but I still believe this is a Knightia based on the overall shape of the skull and the shape of the body. My question is more of a matter of ID'ing bones, because the main reason why I like this fish is you can see many of the bones that the typical Knightia does not show. I can see two operculum, one on each side. The lower and upper jaw I THINK are visible which is kind of weird because this is a ventral fish. The "gill" pieces which are my favorite part of the piece I think are called branchiostegals correct me if I'm wrong. But with many of the bones I have no clue. If anybody has input about this feel free to post what you have to say, I'm all ears!

G'day everyone! Today I was able to go down to Beaumaris and have a hunt. I found some nice fossils but one find stood out. As I was about to leave the site I found this small jaw amongst the shingle. I am not sure what animal it is from but I am thinking fish. It could be mammal but terrestrial mammal material is very rare to find at this site. Thanks, Daniel

Some time ago, @Fossildude19 gave me some bits of Diplurus in diamond hard shale to practice different prep techniques on the tiny little fish. In the same box, Tim sent me a few partial fish of a different species. I got to spend a few minutes working on one of them this afternoon. It is difficult to tell which side is up since this fish has some face issues. Many of the bones are displaced but well preserved. The real question is ID. I’m hoping Tim knows but if not, I have some good features to go on. This fish has distinct gar-like scales and small peg-like teeth.

I stumbled across this green river formation association piece. It's got a leaf, a huge coprolite (not in this photo) and what was labeled as a Knightia. Problem is I'm 99% sure this is not a Knightia! Look at the caudal fin, the dorsal fin, and the skull.....to me this looks like an Amphiplaga!

Hi Everyone, I suddenly have a work trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota coming up next week and I'd like to get out and collect some fossils along the way. I'm driving from Denver to Lead, SD and will be driving north on HW 85 and 18 through Newcastle. I'd be really happy to get a few stops in along the way and any potential information would really be great. Unfortunately, I won't have a ton of time to be able to stop and really dig, so some road cuts or target formations would be super helpful for surface collecting. I'm open to every type of fossil. I know there's a lot of fossils in that section of the state so I'm looking forward to hopefully finding some decent stuff! Thanks! Caleb

Hi can I get some IDs please. Thank you I started a post in member collecting so I have posted here with a link. Thank you

I’ve had a seemingly good day today and have found some interesting stuff near Whitby. Not many ammonites but some nice bone stuff hopefully! I’m guessing the first find is fishy, probably Gyrosteus?

Hello everybody, so right now I'm on my holiday and today I was on a trip to Solnhofen/Bavaria. Most famous for its fossils from the Tethys Ocean during the Jurassic period. I won't post photos of the Museum since there is alread a Topic with good pictures. (But there will be pictures from the museums in Munich and Berlin next week by me). But anyway: You can go and hunt there for fossils by yourself. It's pritty easy to crack these Limestones and you can find lots of Ammonoidea there. I was with a group there and basically everybody found a little Ammonoidea or a part of it. But I got lucky and was the only one finding a fish. Well just the severed head of a fish. Length of the head is around 2 cm (= 0.79 in). In the Solnhofen Museum is a big fossil with lots of little Leptolepides sprattiformis. There where some Leptolepides with missing bodys as well. The explanation was, that a predator was eating the fish but left only the heads. Since the length would fit and Leptolepides where really really common in the area and time period my best guess is a Leptolepides indet. (I really can't tell the diffrence between the two species, since they both lived in the same area). But Orthogonikleithrus indet. is also a suitable candidate. They look similar. Hard to tell the difference since there is no body. Any help is welcome

I don't throw around the word "best" casually, but I think it's safe to say that my recent trip was one of the best in all my years collecting, if not the best. I spent the better part of five or six hours collecting at numerous different sites across western Maryland ranging in age from the lower Devonian to the lower Mississippian, so this is part one of my posts (for simplicity's sake I may include photos of most of my other finds from these sites even if I didn't collect them last go around). The trip started off okay. I visited a couple of my oldest sites that are some small roadside exposures of the Oriskany Sandstone and Mahantango Formation. These sites produced decent material in the past, but over the repeated years of collecting I seem to have worn them out as this time all I found were some brachiopods (including a decent Mucrospirifer sp. from the Mahantango site). I'll talk more about these finds later, but afterwards I found time to visit a new site in the Brallier Formation. By this point it had started to thunder, and while driving to the site the rain started to come in and fog filled up the valley. I thought it was the end of my trip, but as I got to the site it was pretty much dry. My best guess is that I was simply hearing a storm from way off in the distance. The site I visited, as I recently learned, might actually expose two different formations: the Brallier Formation and the Foreknobs Formation. The difficulty in discerning between the various upper Devonian formations in Maryland is multifold. First off, the MGS doesn't differentiate the Harrell, Brallier, and Scherr Formations, even on their most recent geologic maps. Second of all the literature around these deposits is scant and very dated. Most still use the (now) incorrect Woodmont and Chemung Formations, which further exacerbates problems as the Woodmont Formation consisted of the current Brallier and Scherr Formations, making it difficult for an amateur like me to really tell just which fossils occur in either formation. On top of this the contact between the Harrell, Brallier, Scherr, and Foreknobs is mostly gradational, so the differentiating layers lithologically is next to impossible as the beds gradually blend into one another. Generally speaking the Harrell is a dark shale with a fossiliferous limestone (the Tully Limestone) demarcating it's base, the Brallier is mostly dark, fissile shale with interbeds of siltstone, the Scherr is mostly lighter colored shale and siltstone with some sandstone beds, and the Foreknobs is a mixture of gray shales, red shales, conglomerate, sandstone, and siltstone. A guide fossil for the Brallier is the brittle star trace fossil Pteridichnites biseriatus, which was the fossil I originally set out to collect and found in the darker shale. Generally speaking the brachiopod genus Cyrtospirifer sp. in particular C. disjunctus is a guide fossil for the Foreknobs, but I believe this genus also occurs in the Brallier Formation. I found both fossils at this site, the brittle star in the dark shale and the brachiopod in a reddish siltstone, and considering the transition in rock types (one end of the site was just dark, fissile shale and the other had significant amounts of conglomerate and siltstone with shell beds) I think it's likely that the upper end of the cut was in the basal Foreknobs Formation and the lower end was in the upper layers of the Brallier Formation. As such, all of my trace fossils are from the Brallier and almost all of my other fossils are from the Foreknobs. The Brallier Formation is a late Devonian turbidite unit that was deposited in fairly deep water as the Acadian Mountains eroded. It is mostly unfossiliferous, but does have the occasional pelycopod, gastropod, and trace fossil (these being the most common). Ammonoids are also reported from the Brallier. Like I said earlier I originally came trying to find the brittle star trace fossil Pteridichnites but I ended up finding some other very interesting trace fossils. I picked up two of them because I had seen images of similar looking things from the Pennsylvanian of Alabama which I believe @Rockin' Ric labeled as resting traces from horseshoe crabs. These are late Devonian, deep water marine in origin, not terrestrial/freshwater from the Pennsylvanian, so I don't really know what they could be. Perhaps from some other arthropod? Anyways I also found some brittle star traces, including a group of what look to be four or five Pteridichnites biseriatus oriented in life position as if it were an imprint of the brittle star body. Image 1: Pteridichnites biseriatus Image 2: A group of four poorly preserved P. biseriatus Image 3: Unknown arthropod (?) trace fossil Image 4: Unknown arthropod (?) trace fossil If any of you guys know what the last two fossils are, please feel free to let me know.

A big fish from Xingyi, Guizhou of China. Any idea which species it is? Thanks.

Hi TFF friends, Here is one of my recent find. Hunting report to follow. I would like to get your help on this fossil. It looks like a bone and looks like fish to me but as it is the first time I found such fossil, some help would be welcome. It is a little bit smaller than 3 mm and broke right in the middle when I broke open a boulder on the shore. It is Cenomanian of age, and was found in Amakusa, Japan. Thanks by advance, David

As I was putting together labels with photos containing microscopic images of inclusions in coprolites, I came across something that I may have misidentified as a fish tail and vertebrae in a very small coprolite. After looking at it again, the tail looks more like a shrimp or crawfish tail than that of a fish. What I thought were fish vertebrae, look more like crustacean arm joints/elements. Can anyone please confirm this for me? Thanks a bunch! Formation: Oxford Clay (Jurassic - Callovian) Location: Orton Pit, near Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, England

Here are some of my fish fossils from the Eagle Ford group of North Texas. Apsopelix sp.

This fish is 13cm, just dug up from Xingyi of Guizhou, China. Any idea what species is it?