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Good afternoon, fossil friends! This post is a bit of a long shot, but I figured I’d rather ask than not! This may be the incorrect thread to PLAN trips, so if it is, please let me know and I’ll delete it! I certainly intend to share some stories from past trips, but I’ve found myself with free time Wednesday in the first half of the day and I’d love to go on an adventure fossil hunting with someone who is also available, should anyone be up for that! I’m also down to plan future trips for other dates! I live in Denton county and I’m more than willing to travel a couple hours for a productive site! I myself have only explored the well-known north Texas sites such as Mineral Wells, Post Oak Creek, and Lake Texoma. If anybody would like to go there, NSR, or any other places they know of, it’d be really cool to explore with another fossil fanatic. My girlfriend is a great partner, but I always feel bad boring her with my rocks! Plus, I haven’t gotten to explore or learn as much about the fossils of this region as I’d like. I was a part of Dallas Paleo for a while, but after moving out of my parents’ house I haven’t had the time to rejoin, but hope to in the future! For now, I’d like to take some of my free time to learn with other paleo nerds when I can. Please reply if you’re interested in meeting up sometime and heading out to find some ancient friends!

I recently got interested in fossil hunting when my family found a couple of fossils while wading in the river near our home. Everything my husband and I have found has been on a sandbar or in shallow water. I've been told the river can be a good place to find Pleistocene fossils of big mammals and reptiles. We've found several things that I'm hoping people can help me identify in the next few days, but it may be easiest to start with one that doesn't require a lot of pictures so I can test out this whole submission process. =-) We found this and debated about what it was. It didn't look like normal petrified wood, and it resembled a mammoth tooth fragment I saw on this site. Any info would be great. I have more pictures if they would be helpful. I'm looking forward to posting a few partial bones we've found and some reptile-related things (unless I'm guessing completely wrong on those) in the next day or so. Thank you in advance. --Brandy

I know these teeth are very difficult to identify. Based on its size I believe it is a lower tooth from a three toed horse. The crown is about 15.8mm. @Shellseeker @Harry Pristis

Hello! I'm a novice looking forward to learning more about fossil hunting and paleontology. My family and I were wading in the river a while back and my sister-in-law found a couple of 'rocks' we thought might be fossils near my home in Southeast Texas. I sent pictures to a couple of professors and they told me that we appeared to have fossils but identification was difficult because the picture quality was poor. (My sister-in-law took the fossils home with her, so I only had a handful of pictures we snapped). After that, I got really interested in what type of fossils might be in my area, so I started searching the internet and this site to see if I could learn more. I learned that my area of Texas was home to Ice Age mammals, among other things. I was impressed with how knowledgeable and helpful everyone on this site seems. My husband and I have found a few more fossils in the river. I've cleaned them up and learned more about how to take better pictures for identification. I'm hoping to take some good pictures of our finds and post them on this site this weekend for help with identification. Thank you all for participating in such an educational and useful site. --Brandy

Hi from central Texas. Been lurking a while and after the below find figured it was time to post and introduce myself. My name is Lorne Ledger and I have been fossil collecting for almost 50 years, my specialty is Pleistocene Mammals. I grew up in southern California and my uncle worked at the La Brea Tar Pits so I had great exposure to fossils early. I've collected in most of California, Arizona and parts of Utah and Nevada. Most of my family lived in Texas and I moved here in 1996 where I began looking for fossil locations for my special Pleistocen mammal interests. I make frequent trips to Florida and have an extensive collection. Below is an image of my latest find last week in a small rock shelter/cave in Burnet County, TX. This was the first poisonous snake fang I have ever found and it is complete. I am working on a paper for this fauna and slowly working my way through identifications. The relative age is late Pleistocene, no extinct fauna yet, but I am always hopeful. The main location of the fossils are from a fissure fill somewhere up higher in the rock that get washed down into a small hollow. Here is one more critter identified so far. An upper shrew molar

First Fossil Hunting Trip I decided to take the family on our first fossil hunting trip today and we had a great time exploring. I'm new to this forum and also new to fossil hunting. We didn't exactly know what we were looking for, but I came across this interesting piece. Does anyone happen to know what this is? To me, this looks like a tooth, but have no clue if I am right or not. Thanks in advance!

Took a little trip up to the Texas Panhandle for a little get-away and some fossil hunting! My parents, my husband and I rented an Air B&B near Clarendon TX (figured that would be a relatively "safe" pandemic travel solution and it worked out quite well!). We chose Clarendon (well, Howardwick, actually) because it was midway between the places we wanted to visit, AND, it is actually a famous area which the illustrious Mr. Cope of the Bone Wars (in the mid-1800s, Mr. Cope of the Academy of Natural Science in Philly and Mr. Marsh of Yale, vied to find the best and the most dinosaurs around the US) found and named a Miocene faunal bed- the Clarendon Beds at the Spade Flat Quarries at the RO ranch (An interesting aside....my mom worked at the Yale Peabody Museum when she was pregnant with me....surrounded by the dinos that Mr. Marsh collected. I'm pretty sure that's where my paleontological bent came from...) So to start our trip, we actually stayed a night in Snyder TX, and it's funny when you travel, the things you find...like dinosaurs, everywhere! And in Spur TX, a mural that we just happened to drive by! And outside of Canadian TX....on a hilltop! The first fossil stop was a Comanche Peak/Edwards Formation Roadcut - I had heard that you could find Pedinopsis Echinoids there...so we stopped the first day around 4pm...it was 98 degrees. I found a little echie that I THOUGHT might be a pedinopsis but was afraid it was really a Coenholectypus (which sadly, turned out to be the case. Nothing against Coenholectypuses, I just have a few of those!) . The next morning, I wanted to stop back by on our way to Clarendon, but a cold front blew through that night and the temp went from nearly 100 to 40 the next morning! Fortunately the wind was not blowing, so I got to stop back by and found a nice Engonoceras gibbosum ammonite, my first whole one of that species. Everything else was stuff I'd already found, but I did find a lovely Lima bravoensis. So on to Clarendon. I did my "homework" - searching the internet for info, Texas Pocket Geology site for formations and Google Maps for likely spots to search. The lake near Howardwick was Permian, so we looked there....no luck. I found the Miocene Spade Flats area and went up dirt roads to find it....didn't quite find it, but found the right formation....but no fossils. We drove along the road to look at Miocene era roadcuts that I saw posted about here on FF and no luck. So basically, the Miocene Clarendon Beds were a washout and the Permian in that area is non fossiliferous, apparently! Sometimes the fossil hunting is not exactly.....lucrative. Alas. But I did get to see Caprock State Park (and the Texas Bison Herd) Palo Duro Canyon and its Permian (red) overlayed by Triassic (purple and yellow) And some Pronghorn Antelope And then I FINALLY got some good fossil hunting in at a Pennsyvanian era roadcut near Mineral Wells! Finally! Some good new stuff! PIcs coming.... Gastropod Cymatospira montfortianus (1/2 inch) My first find of a Crinoid "bulb" -not completely but partial at least! 1/2 inch 6 fragments of a Crinoid Graffhamicrinus bulb "kit" in pieces (only four pictured, obviously) And some beautifully preserved Echinoid plates And finally, the last place we went was Archer City, where the Permian Red Beds are located, just outside the city. Again, I tried to find some likely looking roadcuts or places were we could go, but alas, it's all private property and nothing looked accessible. So, no Permian fossils or Miocene Fossils, this trip, but the Cretaceous and the Pennsylvanian always yield something good! So long, all you Texas longhorns!

Found this odd little thingie while going through some Post Oak Creek gravel... it looks a bit like Groot! hahhahah! Seriosley though. Any clue as to what this might be? Thanks! 1 inch

Here are the Squalicorax sp. shark teeth I mentioned in my earlier post. As with the others, these didn't come with specific location information, but were most likely collected in the North Texas area. My IDs may be way off, so please correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks for looking! The scale in the photos is in centimeters. #1 - Squalicorax baharijensis #2 - Squalicorax pawpawensis #3 - Squalicorax falcutus #4 - Squalicorax sp. - I'm not sure what species this might be. The blade is finely serrated in case it's hard to tell from the photos.

So I had a few hours off the other day and decided to hit a favorite spot in the Glen Rose Formation. The Glen Rose is Lower Cretaceous (Albian) and can be very fossiliferous. For those familiar with this formation the particular layer I was hunting is near the top of the Lower Member in what is known as the "Salenia texana" zone. As the name implies it is abundant with the echinoid Leptosalenia texana. But it also produces another handful of echinoids, some common and some rare. I was hunting(hoping) for the rare ones... Now let me tell you it has been a long hard summer and this week was the topper with my wiener dog Bacon getting snake bit in the back yard and things at work being extra hectic and, well just life in general in this time of plague... So I was DUE BIG TIME for a good hunt. Within the first five minutes I knew it was going to be good. We recently had some good rain and there were no footprints in sight. And it was bright and clear and perfect "urchin" light. Some of you know just what I mean by that. Sharp clear sunlight at the right angle makes those tubercules pop, even when half buried in the marl. My first good find was a fossil I had been looking for for a while and one that I got skunked on at the last PSA field trip. Jamie Lynn and a few other club members found them and I was teasing them about it. It was a comatulid crinoid cup. Not an echinoid, but another weird echinoderm. Comatulids are stemless crinoids, aka feather stars. From there I started finding those Leptosalenias of which I only brought home the best ones. Lots of other good specimens of bivalves, gastropods, serpulids, etc started filling the bag and then I looked up and there it was, bucket list, holy grail of the GR, a CIDARID! Now I have several "pieces" from there but this one was obviously complete. It was still tucked into the marly layer and hadn't been fully washed out and broken up yet. As I removed it I found it was a bit squooshed, but otherwise intact. The species is Paracidaris? texanus (Whitney & Kellum). Smith & Rader(2009) placed it tentatively in Paracidaris, but it is probably a good ID. Spines and loose plates are common but articulated specimens are few and far between. That was it, I could have gone home right then and there, but I kept going. I was rewarded with a medium sized Tetragramma (semi rare) that will need lots of cleaning and a few more Leptosalenias. Eventually my alarm went off and it was time to head home. A great afternoon in Central Texas.

I recently acquired the Cretaceous shark teeth below from the estate of a Dallas, TX, collector. They were most likely collected in the North Texas area, but didn't come with specific location info. I'm hoping folks here can help confirm my IDs. The scale in the photos is in centimeters. #1 - Leptostyrax macrorhiza - The tooth on its own in the second photo was in a separate batch from the same collector. It may be from the same place as the others or collected elsewhere. #2 - Cretoxyrhina mantelli - I'm more confident on this ID for the top tooth in the first picture than for the other two. The third tooth on its own seems like the crown may be too narrow for C. mantelli. #3 Paraisurus macrorhiza #4 Serratolamna serrata I also have a bunch of Squalicorax sp. teeth that I'll post in a separate thread. Thanks for looking!

Hello all - this is my first post here. I am posting a possible bone fragment my son and I found while beach combing here in Texas. It is from McFadden Beach near Galveston on the Texas coast after a recent storm. It is about 5 cm in length, 2 cm in with and ranges from 2mm to 5mm in thickness. It feels more like stone than bone - but I am not an expert in this field.

*Just a note that this is a follow-up post to the VFOTM post that I wanted to share.* After reading a few posts here on the forum I decided I’d go to the NSR when I got the chance. I’d read it was good for beginners and the opportunity presented itself in April, 2020. I decided I’d make the trip and see what I could find. The first trip I hunted I found very little and walked a great deal until the very end of the day when I finally found two small mosasaur teeth. One of which was a Globidens sp. I was instantly hooked. Two weeks later, on my second ever fossil hunting trip I spotted the exposed section of the tip of the dentary which was only an inch above the marl, and kept walking thinking that it was just wood sticking out of the riverbed. Keep in mind it was after a two hour drive and seven hour hike, I hadn’t read much about fossils, and had no idea about how to properly collect a more complete vertebrate. I continued walking and my exhausted heat addled brain finally processed that the chances of there being an old black piece of wood stuck in the bottom of the riverbed wasn’t that likely. So I walked a few yards back and was lucky enough to find it. Beginners luck! I didn’t take a picture of it until I exposed the first tooth. First picture though is just the anatomy of my find as I understand it. This was the first picture I did take of the right dentary. The NSR can rise pretty fast, especially when it’s raining out west and it was slowly rising so my find started going under water. I was stuck between trying to get it exposed and out of the ground in as best shape as possible and risking it going under which I didn’t know how would effect it. To top it all off the only tool I had was a screwdriver. Here is the dentary nearly exposed. And exposed. I dug a little channel that diverted some of the water away, but it was only effective for a few minutes. And here’s the shape it left in the river bottom. By the time I had the find out of the ground the water level was well over the site and the sun was going down. I decided I'd go back as soon as possible to see if I could find any more.

Hello all, My since we just went through Hurricane Sally, my wife said I need to get out and go collecting. Who am I to argue! So I'm planning a trip to north Texas to collect. I would appreciate and help from y'all to point me in the right direction. I have been to Lake Texoma and the Jacksboro once, briefly, in the past and really had a great time there. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Hello all! Sorting through some new Cretaceous Post Oak Creek matrix and have a few questions on what some of these might be. Thanks for any help! First is this round tooth....could it be croc? It doesn't have any striations, which I think croc would, but it is perfectly round so not a worn shark blade, I think. Anyways, any suggestions would be appreciated! 1. Tooth? 5 mm 2. This little piece...may not be identifiable as anything, but the surface texture is just interesting. 2mm other side 3. Possibly a denticle? Or tooth? I've found lots of sawfish teeth but this one doesn't seem to match anything else. 2mm other side 4. is this turtle? 1.5 cm 6, And lastly....this "claw" thingie. . 2 mm Thanks for looking!

I’ve found several osteoderm of glyptodon and giant armadillo but this one seems a little different. Could it be sloth?

This looks like a very small hoof core of a horse. Any way to know if it’s from a baby horse, three toed Miocene horse or maybe even tapir?

Hello! Im new to the Houston area Moved down from Virginia Beach, where fossilized shark, stingray teeth are common. Decided to walk along local creek found lots of interesting old bottles, pottery fragments, fossilized wood and shells, eventually came along three large fossilized bone fragments and one interesting partial fossil. The only fossils I’m familiar with are the shark teeth exc. common to my area help identifying these and knowledge on other common local fossils is much appreciated.

I've been slowly working my way thru some specimens I collected this summer. I often sort stuff out and tackle one group/order at a time. So I am sorting out some of the rudists that are found at one of my favorite Glen Rose Formation locations. The site is rich with a seriously diverse fauna that includes at least 4 species of rudists. Rudists were rather weirdly shaped bivalves that went extinct at the end of the Mesozoic. They are also, most often, only found locked into hard rock and difficult to collect. But this local produces at least two that you can pick up complete and two that give good internal molds. I started with the requienids Toucasia texana (Roemer) which look more like big gastropods than bivalves. As I sorted them by size and quality I found there was one I kept picking up and turning to match with the others. But it wouldn't... Take a look and let me know when you see the one that is different. I'll follow up with pics of the other species later today. EDIT: I guess I still did didn't turn it around enough times...It's just upside down....feeling kinda foolish about now...still nice fossils I think...

I dug up this distal (I think) humerus today on the Brazos River. I wasn’t sure what I had when I first started digging. By the second picture I knew it was something special. Is there any way to differentiate between mammoth and mastodon humerus? @Harry Pristis @Uncle Siphuncle @fossilus I’m happy to provide additional pics if needed.