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Hopefully one of the trilobite experts can identify this specimen. Here is one of a couple of unidentified trilobites I collected from the Ordovician Liberty Hall Formation near Blacksburg, VA many years ago. It is 3 inches long and is the negative. It looks to have 10 segments. Since I've been cateloguing my collection, I'm also trying to get some of the unknowns identified. I'll be sending a couple others out to you guys. Thanks

Today I went on a dual club field trip (Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois and Rock River Valley Gem and Mineral Society) to an Ordovician aged quarry in Roscoe, Illinois. It was a hot day for fossil hunting, but a cool breeze kept things refreshing. There were over 20 people on the trip and everyone was finding fossils of some sort. Some pictures of the quarry.

Howdy! I have a neat puzzle for the experts today! I know that rostrochonchia are not super easy to find... so I submit the follow picture. Most of the "shelled" creatures I unearth are brachiopods; cincinnetina meeki, Lepidocyclus, Rafinesquina...etc... HOWEVER! this specimen is unique to my collection. Found in northern Cincinnati - Upper Ordovician - The pronounced ridges are different than anything else found. Posted to an Ohio Fossil group, someone with a keen eye made the possibility of Rostroconchia. From my understanding these are not found often. Looking for help in identification. I do not have the tools at hand to remove anymore of the matrix without damage to the remaining fossils in the hash plate... (I have a dremel tools and dental pics...I'm lame) which are neat too. Rostrochonchia or Plaesiomys subquadratus (I compared to these specimens I had) As always, looking for education and conversation.

Hello all, This strange fossil is from the Platteville of Beloit Wisconsin and I have no idea what it is. It is fairly well preserved with a fine granular texture to it. Any ideas are welcome! (3 inch post it note for scale)

I've been trying half heartedly to get an ID on this for a while now, stoked I've stumbled on this forum! This is from the golden Bay cement works quarry in Nelson, NZ. Found in same area as many bivalves, sharks teeth, corals and snails.

This morning I got up early so I could hit the St. Leon, Indiana road cut before I did my 5 hour drive home. Like all of the other areas that I visited these past couple days, I was the only one collecting. I thought yesterday was hot, but today I spent 5 1/2 hours in 93 degree heat. I only hit a small portion of the roadcut and only on one side. This location is one of my favorite to collect and I could spend 1 week there and not check out the whole area. Unlike the other locations from this week that are mostly made up of bryozoan, this place is mainly made up of different species of brachiopds. I like to take the road less traveled at this location and that means going vertical on the scree to move up to the different levels. Doing this is very sketchy and you have to watch your footing as you can loose three feet of progress with a misstep. If you have not had a chance to visit this location and if you like Ordovician fossils or just fossils in general, this is a bucket list must. Here are some pictures of the area- Fossils are found on all levels of this terraced roadcut, I found a lot of great looking brachiopods that were on the larger site for this location. The farther up that you go, I ran into some really cool small brachiopods, I do not know what species they are, but they are very nice. Hash plates are also all over this site and I you want a glimpse of past life in a plate, you will have your pick. Here are some pictures of the different brachiopods along with some nice hash plates. During this visit I found 1 or 2 of my best Rafinesquina that I have ever found, there are some so so ones also. In my experience, it is not very often that I find real nice ones. I believe that this is an Eochonetes- Here are some of the little ones that I found on the Trilobite layer- if someone knows what species they are, please let me know. I have never found one of these at this location and I am looking for an ID on this one also- it is almost complete. I am thinking it might be Vinlandostrophia. I found several nice brachs that I believe are Rhynchotrema dentatum. Here are pics of other species and Hash Plates- More Brachs on next Post

I tried to post this last night, but my phone was not cooperating. Yesterday was a hot day and I spent about 9 hours outside collecting and going through a lot of water. I first stop and my first location on Monday located in Wilder, Kentucky. This site is very productive and I wanted to stop back and check out another portion of it. Here is a picture of the location- Here are some of my finds- Cryptolithus tessellatus- Flexicalymene meeki- Flexi / Crypto and Isotelus Parts- Graptolites: Geniculogratus typicalis

Today I drove from Northern Illinois into Indiana, over to Ohio and down into Kentucky to do some collecting on AA Highway. I stopped and spent 7 1/2 hours at 4 sites along AA, I will start with my first stop which was located in Wilder, Kentucky. I believe that this is the Kope Formation and is Upper Ordovician in age. Here are some of my finds- I only found one sort of complete trilobite- Flexicalymene sp. Here are a bunch of trilo- bits of Flexi and the lace collar trilobite Cryptolithus sp. This location had numerous loose Sowerbyella sp. brachiopods. I did find one bi valve- I find one plate that had some graptolites- I found a couple cephalopods- A couple cool Crinoid stem plates- This may or may not be something- Site 2 on next post.

I was able to fit in some prospecting for new sites while the missus had a week off from work. Obviously I couldn’t monopolize all the vacation as the main purpose was to visit a relative and lounge on a beach. Regularly accessible and productive Ordovician sites in Ontario are few and far between, mostly relegated these days to the biannual trip to the quarry in Bowmanville, or to the creeks around the greater Toronto area (GTA). Trilobite collecting in Ontario is massively curtailed by a confluence of factors sadly common in so many other areas: development, quarries that no longer permit access (even to clubs), laws governing protected areas, and over-collecting. We have a rich abundance of trilobites in Ontario, just as in New York, but accessible sites remain a problem. This means defaulting to the traditional method of prospecting new potential areas, and even putting a hard shoulder into shovelling a lot of soil to expose bedrock. This means smaller areas that are more easily exhausted. A pic of our haul from the two spots:

So many orthocones in Etobicoke creek I couldn't carry them home. Some examples attached. But what is that little 1cm grey doo-hickey with 2 convex lobes?

This is another piece from the Platteville formation in Beloit Wisconsin. Inside a gastropod shell there is a hexagonal pattern that sort of looks likes Paleodictyon, but I think this fossil formed in too shallow of water for Paleodictyon to occur, but I am not sure. Its on a 3" post-it note for scale. (There is also a nice Pterotheca to the left!)

My last excursion into the fossiliferous rocks of SE Minnesota turned up this small plate of crinoidal material. I kept it because the one center piece looks a bit like a small crinoid cup to an uneducated eye (mine). This is TINY, about 3 mm in width. Cup?? If so, any genus/species to attach to it. Thanks for looking. @crinus Mike

Was going to dispose of this brachiopod when I noticed what looked like some sort of epibiont on it. Any thoughts and possible ID??? Thanks, Mike

Ordovician Stewartville member of the Galena Formation Southeast Minnesota Pygidium I'm thinking... Sorry, best pics I could get. Ceph or enrolled? Looks like trilo eyes staring at me, but what do you think? This is wet to see it better. The dry pics just didn't turn out at all. The "eyes" seem white to me and are raised. Thoughts??? Thanks for looking! :-D

Hello fossil folks Just another one of those “Rediscovering New York” posts. This Edition will include my efforts looking for the Trenton group and exploring the Pulaski formation. More Ordovician exploration in the central New York area. This past Saturday me and my good friend Matt did some trout fishing in the Rome area and another town north of Rome. I had scouted these spots for 2 reasons.....trout and trilobites! One location seemed to have Trenton group exposures and another I had already confirmed as the Pulaski formation but wanted to explore it more. Both were located on stretches of the Mohawk River and anyone can go fish/hike these waters. I learned of another Trenton group exposure with trilobites but it’s posted trespassing. Eventually Ill get the courage to do some door knocking in the area to try and find the owners. I guess I don’t know what I would say lol. I wasn’t really in the mood for that so I went to legal stretches of the Mohawk River for this adventure. The goal: 1. Find Trenton group exposures 2. Confirm trilobites from the Pulaski formation 3. Catch trout!!! More to follow....

On Sunday, I saw this trilobite just sitting there on the face of a cliff. Unfortunately part of this "roller" is missing. I do not do well with IDing rollers so am asking for help!! My guess is Anataphrus vigilans but the specimens I have found have been in the Maquoketa.

Hey everyone, I'm touring colleges in Ohio from tomorrow to Tuesday and I wanted to know if there would be any opportunities to go fossil hunting in areas nearby the colleges I'm looking at. I'll be touring them in this order- -Wittenburg University in Springfield, OH -Denison University in Granville, OH -Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, OH -The College of Wooster in Wooster, OH Let me know if there are any good sites that would be accessible in these areas. Thanks, PN

Hello everyone! I’ll be doing a few posts here and there named “rediscovering New York”. Ive been doing a lot of research recently and I had massive geologic maps printed out from office max a couple months back. They are a very valuable tool. I’ve been finding a lot of potential sites from them and I may post what I find but not necessarily post the actual locality for reasons that anyone can stroll onto the forum and extract information. Since I’m in central New York...Utica, New York to be exact I started doing some searching in my own hometown. Triarthrus is known to many collectors in New York. The Utica shale has some nice exposures in the Little Falls, NY area that collectors have posted about many times on the forum. I had a feeling I could find some to the west in my hometown. Before I went to school for geology me and some friends were wandering around in the woods behind his backyard he took us to the “gorge”. All I really remember were sequences of black shale. This was at least 15 years ago. Somehow the memory came flying back to me while doing research. I had forgotten this memory for years and years. Last Friday night (day before I found that Eurypterid!! Lol) I was determined to have a look. I went to a local park adjacent to the stream in question and took a walk. It wasn’t long before I saw another hiker...... and promise The Utica shale!! This must be a different sequence than what’s found in Little Falls cause this shale seemed different from my samples to the east. I found this not long into the hike!! This was really exciting. First confirmed local trilobite in some time I presume. I don’t even know if these have ever been documented here. I have a handful of papers on the Ordovician sequences and even some specific to the Utica shale and I haven’t seen this locality reported. I also have a limited access to scholarly articles so that may be a reason too. Seeing this in a weathered block I assumed I needed to keep going up stream. I sadly destroyed this trilobite trying to reduce the block....it was heartbreaking but I knew I could find more if I found that. The march continued! I decided to try and find something “in situ”. In my past experience the Utica shales can be barren then you start seeing bits sometimes. I had to assume something was around in these shales. Then I found this negative of a complete Triarthrus. The actual trilobite washed away ugh...This was in situ and also proved they came from the local bedrock found under my feet. This was still a very exciting find for me. I took it home as proof of concept. Got it out in 2 clean pieces luckily. further down stream I found this 3/4 specimen in a block. This time I didn’t destroy the prize. This made up for the first blunder. cephalopod. Poor preservation. Found a decent cephalon in a weathered block. Got it out clean. heres a close up. In conclusion....I really need to go back and hike further. Upstream the sequence appears to open up again into some vertical walls but it’s far upstream. I need more than a Friday night to do the hike! This area is weird and appears to be used by snowmobilers and 4 wheelers depending on the season. There are trails all around so I have no clue what the land status is. It appears locals see it as a little known, little used parcel of land sandwiched between dozens of backyards. One of my other fiends that used to live in that area had a snowmobile trail going right to his own backyard. Anyway, this was a very interesting development for me. A milestone for sure. I hope I can go back and find a decent specimen. Just need to find the time to make the hike. I have so many places on my list to visit! Thanks for reading, Al

It was a planned family get together at my sister's ranch in Kentucky to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. I was travelling from Southeastern New York by car. Made it to Harrison, Ohio the first day, right on the border with Indiana. Next morning, weather was pleasant and I was out to the famous St. Leon road cut, a place that I've wanted to visit for years. Finally made it there. Spent the entire day. Despite the site's fame, didn't see another collector and except for one brief shower the weather was perfect though a little on the warm side. I explored the entire exposure though the best was just below one of the terraces where the brachiopods and corals were weathering out of the shale complete.

I don't know whether I should have put this in the ID section instead, as I'm looking for some info and for help in sorting out what I've got, but not necessarily IDs per se. But it's also a sort of show-and-tell, so here goes. The info I'm trying to sort out has to do with the locations and formation/stages of some of the items. To help, I'll post the Ordovician correlation chart from the ICS and this other one from a paper on the Valongo (Portugal) site recently posted in the Documents section, showing the known soft-bodied sites of the Ordovician... The latter seems a little too tidy, with the deposits fitting exactly within the given stages, but maybe it will be of some help:

I scored a couple of big chunks of fossilized coral, and I am curious to learn more about it. It appears to be some form of tabulate coral and I think it comes from Ordovician deposits in Kentucky. That's about all I know about it. Does anyone know what species this is, or if the Ordovician age range is correct? Would something like this be found in or around Bardstown Kentucky? Thanks in advance for any help!

Rare fossils provide more detailed picture of biodiversity during Middle Ordovician by University of Kansas https://phys.org/news/2019-06-rare-fossils-picture-biodiversity-middle.html The paper is: Kimmig, J., Couto, H., Leibach, W.W. and Lieberman, B.S., 2019. Soft-bodied fossils from the upper Valongo Formation (Middle Ordovician: Dapingian-Darriwilian) of northern Portugal. The Science of Nature, 106(5-6), p.27. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333371024_Soft-bodied_fossils_from_the_upper_Valongo_Formation_Middle_Ordovician_Dapingian-Darriwilian_of_northern_Portugal https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julien_Kimmig http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00114-019-1623-z PDF files of other papers about soft-bodied fossils at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Julien_Kimmig Yours, Paul H.

I had a group of families fossil hunting through Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center on Saturday and one family found this incredible, and very large, trilo molt, or is it a whole one? How I wish I would have found this! Beautiful specimen! To me, on site, this appears to be the actual shell of the 500 mya trilo, that smooth and detailed! ID PLEASE Sorry, no more pics, they took it home to WI. Ordovician Fillmore County, MN Stewartville member of the Galena Formation