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Anyone have any they recommend? Something easy to slip on and flexible. Debating the hip waders or something simple to slip on over boots.

Anyone having any luck this winter so far along the Potomac? Found bunches of sand shark teeth so far. Tides been high lately haven't been able to do anything this past weekend. Just checking to see if anyone has been finding anything good.

This summer I’ll be at Lake Gaston (Virginia) for vacation, so I was wondering if there are any locations there or nearby that might contain fossils. I’m mostly looking for shark teeth, but if there’s a spot with other fossils, I’d be willing to check it out. Any help or tips are appreciated!! Thank you!

@GeschWhat @Carl It has been cold, but the shrimp (callianassid) coprolite burrows I find have been relatively plentiful (more than decent sized shark teeth) with recent strong north winds and low tides. One puzzle to me is the variation in diameter of the burrows. Carl, our expert, believes the coprolites just sank and deposited in burrows (at another site I have found a few steinkerns with similar, sparser deposits. ) All of the burrows I have found on the Rapp beach have been cylindrical, or possibly pieces of cylinders (of course, this could be bias in my collecting, but I examine lots of stuff!) Usually the coprolite deposits are thicker on one side (the bottom?) of the burrow. If the burrows are truly made by the callianassids (Carl says no, others may argue) I expect the coprolites in the big burrows to be bigger than those in the smaller burrows. I have collected enough to get a tentative answer, but need to align by brightness for comparison photos (some burrows and coprolites are very light, some are dark). Here is what I have collected so far:

I'm new to this. I'm a land surveyor; a new job site I'm on had a storm water creek burst & cut a new path. It exposed a fossil layer. At the bottom was a perfectly preserved reef of large oysters. As it had been undisturbed it was pristine. I've spent a few lunch breaks combing the creek, not much time, & found 100s of shark teeth, 1,000s of coprolites, dozens of bones. It seems everything was preserved here; I've found shrimp & crabs even. But it is getting destroyed rapidly & will be obliterated during the construction phase. I can not get anyone interested in checking it out before it's gone & I don't really know who to ask. The site is in Maryland, near DC. I don't want to give too many specifics on lacal. I don't know what to do to try & save some of what's in there so here I am. Any ideas or suggestions would be appreciated. I can post pics of what I've found upon request, i just wouldn't know where to start. Thanks

A quick note from my last few hunts. The water is cold but clear and I have been finding several shrimp coprolite burrows three of my last four trips. Sometimes 4 to 8 small teeth, sometimes double that. Have been looking hard for the makos which appear in the winter, and quickly pocketed what I thought was a nice one (but smaller than the mako I posted last week; added for scale to some scans). When my 8 year old niece saw it, she said ,"that's a megalodon tooth!" and looking closely I saw she was correct, fine serrations and the bourlette. About 2 1/2 inches with only the tip missing serrations. Will try to catch up with other finds later, but this is the first whole, decent (though small) meg I have found in five years! They do exist at this beach after all (still very rare).

Two species from the Yorktown Formation along the James River in Virginia that I cannot identify. One a coral (if not genus name, family?) and the other what I presume to be part of a bivalve. Both are very common yet I cannot find them in any references. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

October has not been kind to me health-wise; jetlag, diarrhea, flu, and bronchitis. Still weak and fighting a cough, but a beautiful time to be outside (love the Fall!, just wish the teeth would cooperate better). Typical sand shark spikes, angel shark, drum, and verts (more gravel than sand or shell bits), lots of small teeth, not sure of ID. A few tiger shark teeth (rare for me), a few small, de-enameled makos, a small bonito nose (second small one I've found?) and nothing spectacular or BIG, though more "shrimp coprolite burrows" than usual. I tried new places but the results are about the same (less teeth?) than my older spots.

I’m posting the nicer Phyllodus pharyngeal plate specimens that I’ve collected over the years from the Eocene Nanjemoy Formation of Virginia because many collectors really never get to see Phyllodus specimens. These mouth plates come from bony fish. I only find a nice specimen every 7 or 8 trips to the Nanjemoy Formation so they are not common. There is a wide variation in the tooth morphologies of these mouth plates. No two mouth plates are identical. The mouth plates are comprised of individual varying sized and shaped teeth and can have up to six layers of replacement teeth. However, White (1931) demonstrated that these variations were merely variants among a broad range of possible intergradational morphologies and Estes (1969) synonymized the previous named species with P. toliapicus. Some specimens still have formation matrix and other debris on them because I don’t clean them in my ultrasonic cleaners like other specimens because individual teeth can dislodge very easily. The below specimens range in size from 7 mm to 22 mm in the longest dimension. Continued in next reply Marco Sr.

Hello, one of my brothers brought this to me after digging it up in our garden. He believes that it's a dinosaur egg but I'm not sure. We live in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia if that helps.

I donated 20,000+ Eocene marine Virginia coprolites to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in 2015. There have been several formal presentations given on these coprolites to date and a major paper is in final review. To see numerous coprolite pictures and read about/see previous presentations check out the below TFF link: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/50059-what-ate-what/& A copy of the latest poster presentation given on these Virginia coprolites at the GSA Annual Meeting in Phoenix, Arizona, USA on September 22, 2019 is below (If you click on the below picture which will open it in a new window and click on the + symbol twice, you can read the text): Marco Sr.

Here's a strange one. I found plentiful piles of what I thought were casts and internal molds in the iron-rich St. Mary's clay of Virginia last year. Loose clam fossils riddled blocks of talus. I was able to wiggle some out of their ancient resting places without s much as scratching the matrix. Generally that's because the shell disintegrated, leaving a void between the mold and the cast. If you look closely, however, what looks here like an internal mold isn't. The sculpture on the surface is clearly the outside of the shell. If it were the inside, you would see round protrusions where the ligament attached to a depression in the shell, not concentric ridges. Shown here is the most distinct of my specimens, but not the only one. Any thoughts? Mercenaria campechiensis, Miocene, VIrginia

I have always loved history and old things from the past. I have been a Civil War relic hunter on and off for 40 years or so. I don't get to do that much anymore because pretty much all the land I used to hunt has been bought up by the Government or the Civil War preservation people and you can no longer hunt there. A couple of my old hunting buddies got me into Native American point hunting along the banks of the James and Pamunkey rivers and for awhile that was fun but all they wanted to do was hunt the same spot over and over looking for that perfect point. We would hit a bank and everybody would take off walking the shore line and most of the time when they got back I was still right in the same spot scratching along the bank with a bag full of rocks, not many points but a lot of rocks that looked like arrowheads, to me anyway. Every now and then they would come back with that perfect point and the bragging would begin and they would always give me a hard time about my bag full of rocks. After awhile I had collected a pretty good sized rock pile and decided to make me a rock garden in front of my shop. While moving all those rocks to their final home I began to notice some strange markings on some of them and after looking closer I noticed how much some of the sharper pointed rocks looked like teeth from some kind of animal or fish. I had found shark teeth before walking the banks of creeks and streams but most were tiny little things, some of these I was finding were much larger and looked like regular rock rather than the normal looking shark teeth we more commonly found. When I would try to explain my thoughts they would laugh and just tell me to, 'drink another beer, and you will think more clearly in the morning'. LOL I then decided I'd find me a new hobby but ever time I walked by that rock garden I would always see something different than I had saw the last time I looked. One day on an outing with my oldest son I dug up this rock that really looked weird it was covered with mud but I could tell there was something different about it so I threw it in my bucket. Yeah, I'll admit I am hooked as I no longer carry that little bag tied to my belt loop I now carry along a couple 5 gallon buckets. Besides, that little bag would get so heavy it was hard for me to keep my pants up. Anyway, when I got home and dumped out my buckets on the ground so I could wash off some of the mud and as soon as I sprayed that one funny looking rock with the hose this shape of what looked like a snake popped out like a neon sign. Once clean I could tell that the rock was a sedimentary type rock by the layers that it showed. There were some dark layers and in-between were some white layers. Anyway, the top of the rock that had the white rocks on it looked like it had been carved away to make the shape of a snake. Boy!! I really got laughed at when I let the boys know what I thought I had found. They decided there was no amount of beer that would ever make me normal. In my limited knowledge about fossils I knew that when a fossil forms only the bone or more solid parts of animal would fossilize and become rock so I knew, or I thought I knew that the whole snake would not be presented the way this one was. So I decided that some poor Indian one day stumbled onto this rock and a light bulb went off in his head and he said to himself, "you know Tonto, you haven't given the little lady back at the Tee Pee a present in a long time. Maybe I'll sketch up a picture of a snake on this rock and give it to her for her birthday. Then she can replace that awful looking picture of her mother she has hanging on the Tee Pee wall. Old Tonto was always thinking of ways to keep the peace back at camp. Sadly, he probably should have been paying more attention to his surroundings cause along came a big ol bear and he jumped out of the woods just as Tonto was putting the finishing touches on his masterpiece and ate him in one big bite. Thankfully, the bear spit out that rock right there on the edge of the bank before he headed off back to high country. I'm going to post a pic of this rock for you guys to take a look at and hopefully someone can tell me if my thoughts are anywhere near something that could be possible.

Made two trips to the creek while worrying about Dorian; one trip to the beach, but not much there (picked clean by Labor Day visitors? Only one olive shell and a few bleached, worn small teeth.) I pooled the stuff collected in trips from the same general area in the creek. One of the trips I used a slightly coarser screen, followed by a window screen in response to @MarcoSr excellent recent post "What are you missing????". Since my teeth are micro-sized to begin with, I was sure that there would be lots of new stuff to sort through. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in my initial characterization of the "fines". I cannot see well looking about in the creek, but am very near-sighted and think I can see most of what is there at home (but will retry with a different substrate spot; the spot I was digging was fine gravel and shell bits). I do see more smaller drum teeth. Some bone bits and a few angel shark teeth (may have damaged the roots on them as well with the double screening, always wondered if screening was why my cowshark teeth were often rootless?) No nurse shark or cookie-cutter shark teeth yet, but still intrigued. The two trips were mostly sand tiger teeth, mostly rootless or small root spikes. Some were glossy and nice but I'm guessing the gravel takes its toll. A couple of verts, a small piece of a bonito nose(?), a bunch of angel shark teeth (a few with broken triangular bases; I stood them up for the scan). A bunch of drum teeth (and small round rocks, not shown). One ugly worn cowshark tooth. One for sure small mako, and a few that I cannot see any serrations on (micro mako teeth?) More serrated triangular teeth than usual for me, mostly gray sharks, but one worn-on-the-tip hemipristis. Two tooth pieces, one relatively flat with what looks like hemi-serated edge of enamel, and one heavier, triangular edge with finer serrations that I think, hopefully, is a smallish megalodon. If so, this is the first meg that I have seen from the creek since a kid found a big one thirty years ago there (teeth were much more plentiful, but meg teeth were always rare there).

Combined the results of two trips to the freshwater creek (five hours total of hunting). Good variety, but no size and lots of broken stuff. One place I was digging in fine gravel and found several vertebrae, few intact, skate teeth, lots of drum "teeth", many broken, and three angel shark teeth, one broken. Also found small rootless tiger shark tooth and a badly broken small mako. The other spot, more sand and shells (probably should start collecting them, just fragile) yielded mostly sand tiger teeth. More overlap than I note here, but gives the picture. Found three sand tiger symphysials, highly unusual (wish they were cowshark! ) Did find two broken cowshark teeth, one each spot).

I started collecting a new Eocene research site in Virginia this year. I have written landowner permission to collect this site. I’m posting a few quick pictures of what I found in a single recent trip to this site. When I’m at the site, I dig formation out and sift it in a ½ inch mesh sift in stream water. A window screen catches what falls through the ½ inch mesh sift. I take home the material caught by the window screen, break it down further through washing/drying cycles, and finally search the residue for fossils. I spend about three hours per trip sifting at the site and another 3 hours or so breaking down the material that I brought home. I want to show what I find at the site in the ½ inch sift versus what I find in the material that I bring home. For those of you who sift at a site but don’t catch what falls through your sift, I want to show you what you could be missing. Every site is different. However, unless you bring some of the smaller material home to check it out, you will never know what you are missing. The below picture shows what I found in my sift at this site in my ½ inch mesh sift during this trip. I could use a ¼ inch mesh sift at the site to find more at the site but that dramatically increases my time looking in my sift at the site and the smaller mesh size tends to damage more (cusplets, root lobes, etc.) of the specimens that fall through the mesh. Not a bad trip with some turtle bone and shell, a few sand tiger teeth, a few large bony fish vertebrae and some large fish coprolites. For the record I usually find a few more shark teeth in my sift than I did this trip. However, all of the pictures below show what I found at home in the material that was caught by the window screen, a very large number of high quality fossils. For size reference the white paper plates are 9 inches in diameter and there are two gem jar sizes, 1.75 inches and 1.125 inches in diameter. Nice quality shark, ray, bony fish, sea snake etc. specimens: Damaged or lower quality specimens: Mostly odd bony fish bones: Bony fish vertebrae: Shark and ray vertebrae: Bony fish jaws and partial jaws: Ray teeth and ray dermal denticles: Cookie cutter tooth and a few nurse shark teeth: Fish coprolites: Lignitized fruits/seeds: Pyrite shell casts: If I only sifted at this site and didn’t take home material caught by the window screen look at all of the fossils that I would be missing each trip. What are you missing???? Marco Sr.

I found this yesterday at Westmoreland State Park in Virginia, which I think is Miocene stuff. Can anyone ID?

These are some fossils that I couldn't quite identify while out looking around an area of land in the Nottoway river drainage today. The first appears to be some sort of bone, my guess is a vertebra potentially belonging to a crocodile, though I am very new to this and am quite possibly incorrect in this guess  Next up is a decent sized fragment of a shark tooth that I initially thought to be a young megalodon, but then wasn't quite so sure after noting the presence of what appears to be a slightly weathered cusp on the side of the tooth that is still present, alongside the fact that the tooth appears to have a slight curvature to it Any insight is well appreciated, thanks! 

I know I'm several years late but I live in Gloucester and would love to look for megs in the area.

99% sure this is just a rock, but the shape just keeps me wondering... Found along the beach of Stratford Hall in Montross, Virginia on 7/6/19. Any thoughts?

Quick trip by the beach. Has been dry, was hoping the water would be clear. The water was clear but didn't find anything outside the surf. A few small pieces of shrimp coprolite burrows, a 'wormed' enamel 'medium'-sized mako, and a few others. Hot and dry. Thunderstorms predicted over the next few days, maybe will stir up the beach?

Went to Virginia a few months ago and came home with a few Chesapectin nefrens encased in solid rock. This one was only exposed as a ring of shell material in a ball of clay, calcite, iron ,broken shell and who knows what else. Normally I prep things with soft brushes, dental picks, a water pick, and very gentle fingers. That wasn't cutting it this time and I had to get aggressive. I spent 3+ hours with a rotary tool and zero practice. It's no museum piece, but it's not horrible. I could simply collect the same species, from the same member of the same formation, at a much closer spot, where the matrix is much looser, but I gotta learn sometime. Suggestions for next time?

Went to Virginia a few months ago and came home with a few Chesapectin nefrens encased in solid rock. This one was only exposed as a ring of shell material in a ball of clay, calcite, iron ,broken shell and who knows what else. Normally I prep things with soft brushes, dental picks, a water pick, and very gentle fingers. That wasn't cutting it this time and I had to get aggressive. I spent 3+ hours with a rotary tool and zero practice. It's no museum piece, but it's not horrible. I could simply collect the same species, from the same member of the same formation, at a much closer spot, where the matrix is much looser, but I gotta learn sometime. Suggestions for next time?