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Hello, I am traveling to the Waco and Austin Texas areas and was wondering if there are any easy to get to sites for echinoids and ammonites? Thanks, Dan

Monday was Labor Day, a holiday. I was going to be off work and home alone. I woke up early for a day off really motivated to get up and get out to the North Sulfur River (NSR), but I was feeling a bit lazy. I didn’t want to wear myself out too much. I am on call all week and being worn out isn’t a good way to start being on call if you have to stay up all night working. I had not been out to the NSR since June, because I nearly did myself in last trip with heat exhaustion. I had plenty of fluids, but the 100 degree heat with no shade was too much for me. Anyway, the weather on Monday was pretty decent. The heat was bearable. Rain was in the forecast. There was a tropical storm spinning off inland and we were having storms from that. I got ready and drove the 1:20 minutes to my favorite bridge outside of Ladonia. I arrived about 9:00. Rain was predicted to start about 11:00. I didn’t know how bad it would be or how long it would last. So, I figured I had about 2 hours to get some hunting in. Entering the NSR can be a challenge along most of the section of river which was channeled back in the early 1900s. The banks are about 30 feet high and mostly vertical. Normally I enter from the south side of the bridge, but it seems everyone I know who goes there enters from the north side. I thought I’d try that entrance for once. I parked my car along a narrow path next to the guardrail near the bridge. I got out and got my gear ready. Before putting on my pack I walked out to the edge of the precipice of the bank and looked down to the riverbed 30 feet below. To my left was the bridge. I saw a ridiculously steep (80 degrees) path, if you could call it that, plummeting down into the river. I thought “No way! You’ve got to be kidding me!!!” It looked more like a wash and going down it would be more like falling or repelling if I had a rope. There was no way I could come back up that with a 40-50 pound pack. Plus I didn’t have a rope with me. Hum, maybe I need to add rope to my NSR gear list. I am not a rock climbing type girl. I am around a soft 50% marshmallow consistency. There isn’t a whole lot of muscle on me. I am all adventure and no brawn. This is a picture of the river from the top of the bank. IT is not the best pic, but you get the idea that it is a long way down. You can't really see the wash, but it starts behind the pillar on the left and runs behind that bush straight down to the bottom. I turned to walk back to my car and drive over to my usual entrance, but as I turned I saw an opening in the dense undergrowth. I walked towards it. There was a rope tied to a tree at the top of the hill. It was strung downhill and attached to another sapling 20 feet below. It wasn’t much of a rope, less than 1 cm thick with infrequent, small knots of maybe 1 cm in size. They would not be much to grab onto. It would help getting down for sure and it looked strong enough, but man was it steep (60 degreeish)!! It was really steep for about 20 feet or so and then leveled off for a bit and then there was some concrete rubble in the wash that ran along the path. From the level area you had to drop down about 3 feet and then walk the rubble to the riverbed. There was only one sizeable (2 inches) sapling to grab at or break your fall with on the 20 foot part. There were numerous saplings and a poison ivy vine that were ¼- ½ inch thick. There was a rebar type stake sticking up about 8 inches from the ground maybe 5 feet down the hill, I assume for a foothold of sorts. It looked like someone had tried to notch some steps into the hill with a shovel every 3 feet or so, but they were eroded so barely of any use anymore. I think I must be crazy, or ridiculously overdue for an adventure. It has been 3 months since I’d been to the NSR after all. I decided to go ahead and try it. I hoped I would not live to regret my choice. I went and got my pack, which was already about 15 pounds with my 4 pound sledge hammer, rock hammer, drinking fluids, my 40 caliber pistol (protection from wild hogs) and other gear. I put my pack on and walked to the edge of the hill. I took one step and slid. I was wearing tennis shoes with only a little tread. I turned around, went back to my car and put on my hiking boots. I tried going down the hill facing forward, but couldn’t do it. So I turned around and grabbed the rope and wrapped it around my hand and began to lower myself down backwards. In retrospect I can see I clearly did not think my exit strategy out. I will post another part in a couple minutes..

Got a chance to get off of work early so I hit a new creek I wanted to check out. I'm glad I did. I was only out for maybe 2 hours. These are my first ammonite and echinoid finds and now I want more!! I'm not use to creek hunting as I'm use to road cuts and mountain terrain

Went out on a hunting trip at the weekend, and came away with quite a few decent finds. These are all in-land finds from locations near Ilminster, and the finds are all from the Toarcian pediod (182-174m years ago). Please forgive me having forgotten most of the names of the ammonites, I'm not great at remembering them. This ammonite, a Dactylioceras of some kind, is covered in clay which is absolutely full of what appear to be trace fossils from worm activity. This isn't uncommon, but I've rarely seen such a vivid example. Close up: The rear of this large, crushed harpoceras is a jumble of mixed up fossil bits, which you often find in the various layers of the beacon limestone. Top left there is quite an interesting bit of shell, which looks as if it might perhaps be part of a crushed teuthid phragmocone. A nice little double-dac. This is one of the scarcer ammonites from this location (I've forgotten the name), especially at this large size. I have one or two locations I can go to and stand a chance of finding these. They are often heavily re-worked, and this specimen was obviously exposed after fossilisation and heavily rolled on the seabed. It's structurally sound, but the shell - which seems to have been originally preserved - has been almost completely worn away. Such a shame!

Some triasic ammonite for exchange! EU.

Hello, I am Richard from Chinese Camp CA. I live atop the Mariposa Formation which is late Jurassic. I try to go fossil hunting every weekend. The quality of fossils is not great, but I regularly find ammonites and buchia, and less often belemnites (and a few oddities I haven't identified). I was born in England and found an ammonite when 5 or 6. I've loved fossils since them (I'm 50) and take my son out hunting for them regularly. I spent 11 year in the US Navy on submarines, and the last 20 at a research lab. To all of you: Best of luck collecting, learning, and enjoying fossils! Richard

Hello all. My wife gifted me with a pay-to-dig fossil trip in Utah last month while on vacation and it gave me the itch. Now this weekend camping near Temple I found these ammonites (?). I think it's safe to say I'm officially hooked!! I got on here as a guest and read UncleSiphuncle's exhaustive rundown of formations around San Antonio and I think these are in the Comanche Peak. I'm ready to get out and start hunting with the fever!! Glad to meet all of you!

Hi to all here , I have been a fossil & Indian artifact collector/hunter for 60 years in the Midwest USA and look forward to learning a lot more about identification from this site. Being retired gives me lots of time to crack rocks. Hope to make friends and maybe get some hunting buddies. Thanks for letting me join and blessings to all. Stenopolis

Hi! Can anyone tell me what species of ammonites are these? They were found in France and they are from the Jurassic period.Any help would be much appreciated.

I cant do any fossil hunting anymore, but i can still prep. My youngest son is a real fossil hunter go gitter. He finds lots of stuff like his father used to do. He worked on this and then called me and asked if I would help out. He has a ME9100 that I gave him and he knows that I have a Junior Jack. A Junior Jack will remove 10 times the rock the 9100 will do. wish I had a before photo, but afraid not. Took me about 7 hours to get this far. Lots and lots of rock to remove. The appature on this Placenticeras is not correct but it was shaped in order to remove rock to expose this male Hoploscaphites crassus? My son May have a before picture. If so, I will post it and then you will understand why ive done what ive done. This rock measures 12 inches. Kinda heavy too! RB

Hi all, Here is one of the Aconoceras nisus ammonites I found in Carniol, prepped. Now unfortunately the center is gone Luckily... it has some incredible sutures! They are very nicely visible, and give the ammonite a really cool look IMO. The real reason for the sutures to be so clear is actually because there is still a bit of clay in between the suture lines. So to be perfectly honest, that means that the prep isn't 100% complete. But I'm purposefully gonna leave it as it is, because this way the wonderful really stand out. Pyrite ammonite Aconoceras nisus Carniol, France "Gargasian", Aptian, Cretaceous (120 my) Found 22/7/2018

Last weekend I used my free time to visit two locations in the area of Solnhofen. Solnhofen is quite a famous fossil location, so many of you will probably know it. During the Late Jurassic, this area was an archipelago at the edge of the Tethys Sea and it preserves a rare assemblage of fossilized organisms. The most famous fossil from there is the Archaeopteryx. At the beginning I was very unsure if it really make sense to visit that location, because I often heard bad things like that its very hard to find something there . And I have to say that it was indeed very hard to find something but nonetheless I found a few fossils and it was much fun. I was firstly for about 3 hours in the visitor quarry Blumenberg. Here is the quarry: It makes sense to bring a shovel with you because you firstly have to put away all the debris before you can extract larger plates. The most common fossil there is the crinoid Saccocoma. Here are some examples: (about 2 cm big) Another very common fossil are coprolites from fishes/ammonites. They are called Lumbricaria: (3-4 cm long)

Hi all, So after learning of the inaccessibility of the location Lacoste, I was wondering if there was maybe another location nearby. On Fossiel.NET I found the location Carniol, which looks very promising! https://www.fossiel.net/sites/fossil_site.php?plaats=148 Anyone got any tips on how to best find fossils and bring them home? How to look, how to take the fossils out, etc? Any tips or comments would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance, Max

Hi there! I'm a botanist who bought a cool ammonite at a rock show as a present for a friend. I ended up keeping it, and have since gotten quite a few others. I'm interested in getting better at identifying ammonites and joined this forum because there don't seem to be many ammonite ID resources available, and I am itching to figure out some of my mystery specimens. I am also planning a trip to the high desert east of the Sierra Nevadas to look at wildflowers and fossil beds next spring and would love some recommendations.

I have four ammonites that I cannot identify, and I hope you guys can help I got no information on their age or where they were found.

I was on holidays last week in southern France,Ardéche,really too hot! but few finds in the cretaceous also

Hello. Good morning to all of my favorite forum! Last week, I was rummaging through our favorite auction site, it was then that I came across so many absurdities that I felt obliged to make an alert here for the most inexperienced collectors who end up paying rivers of money when they think they have found a rare specimen! ========================================== Specimen Nº 01 I'm going to start with this first specimen, which was originally supposed to be in poor condition, so what they did was make a series of scratches in a completely failed attempt to make the specimen more "attractive". And the seller is bold! He announces using the word "natural"! ========================================== Specimens Nº 02 These types of Ammonites here I call Ammonites HP Lovecraft because they are polished (destroying the original and scientific shell here is nothing left) and then the tentacles are completely carved in the purest Cthulhu style of the Master HP Lovecraft: Is it just me who see the resin made with stone dust here, used to glue the carved tentacles? So in this case, even the base "matrix" is not authentic, but yes, it is also made with resin and stone powder! Here the sellers are moderate, in the ad title, they use the word "Healing", but the funny thing is that before I saw all this, I was grumpy, but after seeing all this, I ended up laughing, so maybe really have some "Healing" power! ========================================== Specimen Nº 03 This is my favorite and it was already a topic of debate here at TFF! Looks like Nasa found her and brought her straight from Planet Mars! Does not appear? I believe they originally tried to sculpt tentacles in this specimen, but the glue could not hold the tentacles, or even, maybe the carved tentacles broke, I do not know, but the fact is that she became hideously beautiful bizarre! But still, it remains a specimen with the shell destroyed by polishing and sculpted! I wonder and have ideas if this specimen were black... ========================================== Specimen Nº 04 And to finalize this post with a golden key, I would finally like to introduce you to this specimen, which I call Ammonite Rainbow ... Perhaps the shell is completely natural, but the fact is that the tentacles, I'm sure they are not natural and were carved! ========================================== I do not know if these Ammonites are being adulterated in Madagascar which is exactly where they all come from, or if the adulteration is in China, which, by the way, imports thousands of tons of them annually from Madagascar. But here I register my appeal to those who are starting to collect fossils now, let them not be deceived with bizarre specimens at tempting prices without first seeking some scientific knowledge on the subject. Of course these Ammonites have great value, but merely artistic value, a beautiful decorative object, but never scientific!

Well hello everyone!!! Are trip to the Texas Boarded and Ammonite Beach was one of top trips in Texas. The rumors about large ammonites were very true and our research and friends came thru with some locations. The biggest part of our trip was the work in getting our finds back to our vehicle. We had such a great time on Friday checking out the area as we promised our selves to just look and no collecting until we knew how far our searching areas is and if we found some to be patient. Well that rule went out the window with my wife as the ammonite fever hit her hard. She was grabbing everything in sight... oh lord I needed some extra strength if I was going to make it thru the weekend.... Well I’m use of carrying heavy packs when I go primitive camping. I know my limits and a canoe and pack is about 130-150 lbs but our portage’s are a couple100 feet. But I was tested for sure as as we started hiking to our spots. Location #1 Was a location we hit that allowed us to follow a railroad track for the first 1/4 mile and then on our turn we had to climb a couple of deep cliffs. So I told my wife that if we find any big pieces that she would have to make a choice. Picture or she can carry it out. But after she saw what we had to go thru she agreed and kept her mind on smaller fossils. We found some smaller ammonites at our location and we were pretty happy with the scouting. But we did noticed some tracks of other hunters that were pretty fresh. No big ammonites i cant remember how to insert the picture and keep telling you all our adventures. So I’ll add more pictures to this feed as the sizes are not edited yet.

OK I thought the other two trip posts were getting a bit long. So I am creating separate post for the third trip for the Britton Formation in Collin county, Texas. The other 2 trips are here: I have to write these things in segments. I'm slow at writing sometimes since I write in between chores and such (i.e. other fossil hunting trips). Sunday I had a bit of time to work on writing the rest of the trip report. I was supposed to teach a couple scout badges this weekend outdoors, but wouldn’t you know it, it started raining. I thought I’d go hunting instead because the showers looked isolated, but when I looked at the radar future cast it looks like it will be raining much of the day across the whole area I usually hunt in. So I’ll work on writing the third segment between chores and cleaning fossils. I get so easily distracted. Here it is Tuesday and I'm just getting to post it I made a third trip out to the same spot with the Britton formation in the same week. Joe aka @Fruitbat and I had met at a local Mexican restaurant for dinner on Tuesday, I think it was. We live reasonably close to one another. When I met him for dinner I brought him a couple little slabs and a concretion of carboniferous plant fossils to play with. They were from my trip to Oklahoma at the end of April. During dinner we agreed to go hunting Saturday afternoon, provided I didn't get called in during the night and would be too wiped out to go hunting. I had told Joe I prefer to split the bill and pay for our own meals. He told me that his mother would roll over in her grave if he let me do that. I told him we would talk about that at dinner, trying to hold my ground. We did talk about it, but Joe is stubborn. While I was busy telling a story or talking or something the bill came and he took the bill before I thought to grab it and he paid for both anyway. I think I will either have to be quicker to grab the check or not go to dinner again unless the terms are agreed to up front. Am I being too modern or stubborn? I don't think so, but I am not a guy and I don't get how men think on these matters. I am trying to be practical and fair. I think its a generational gap. Joe is old enough to be. . . , well, lets just say older so as to not give his age away. I go to church on Saturday and the place is only 10-15 minutes away from my church. So the plan was I would go to church and then he would meet me up in a store parking lot near the spot we were going to hunt and we would go hunting from there. I was on call for my work. I have to stay within an hour’s drive of work at all times when I’m on call. I also have to have cell phone service wherever I go so my work can contact me. Believe it or not there are places within an hour of Dallas that I cannot get service at times. So this spot was as good as any I knew of within an hour of my work and I had great cell service there. I met up with Joe and we headed out to a construction dirt pile I wanted to check out first. I had seen it on the way to the spot last time. It was enormous. It was also part of the Eagle Ford group and probably less than 2 miles from the other spot. Sometimes I’ve found great stuff in construction piles. Sometimes they are complete duds. I'd classify this one a dud. This is a picture of the location. It was dirt taken from a new housing development right next to it. The soil was brown and there were a few plates of what appeared to be Kamp Ranch here and there, but the plates were pretty much compressed shell fragments. I'm still learning my formations. Been there, done that before. I knew there were better things waiting a couple of miles away, but I thought I would give the pile the once over anyway, just in case some gem of a fossil showed up. I guess I should have known that brown soil was probably not the best indicator for good fossils within the Eagle Ford. Maybe elsewhere. If anyone knows of brown soil in the Eagle Ford that has good fossils I'd like a little enlightening of what I might expect to find in it should I encounter brown soil in the Eagle Ford again so I don't completely discount and avoid it. I found numerous chunks of calcite and gypsum. There was the very rare very worn oyster and I found a few fragments of septarian nodules with the typical brown and yellow to white aragonite and calcite crystals in them, but these were pretty tumbled and worn down and not freshly broken open. After looking around for maybe 30 minutes we both decided that was enough of that. We headed out to the other location. We parked our vehicles. It was another blazing hot day. I had to convince Joe to bring something to drink. I was ready to put an extra Gatorade into my bag for him if he wasn't going to take one for himself. So he put one in his bag thankfully. It was over 90 degrees F. If you have read my other posts you know the issues with hydration I have had. I'm trying to turn over a new leaf. Plus the creek water out there didn't look quite so drinkable as the NSR water. That was sarcasm. The NSR is not so drinkable at all. I've come across places numerous times where you could tell the wild hogs had relieved themselves in the river by the smell. I still need to get me one of those Lifestraws. I digress. Back to the trip. We started the walk to the spot. This time I brought my rubber creek boots. They are the kind you get from Home Depot that the concrete pourers use when pouring concrete. So they can handle a creek pretty well, but they are a bit hot. We got to the place where the avalanche had happened and Joe wanted to explore the little creek below where the avalanche had happen. The small creek ran along the road. I can't remember if I mentioned that there were a few trees along the creek that had been taken down by beavers. One was one of the largest trees I've ever seen taken down by a beaver. It must have been over 12 inches in diameter. It made me wonder how many beavers died in felling trees. Within the creek there were some areas the water was shallow and the banks were high with lots of exposed rock and soil. I had explored it before. We didn’t really find anything other than the non-Cretaceous oysters. Just as we were about to the other creek where the hunt would begin I got a message from my work giving me a heads up that there was a deceased donor sample coming in for a pediatric, 2 month old heart transplant. I would need to go and work on that when they knew the ETA. I can't remember if I have ever posted my profession. I work in a lab and am a Histoccompatibility and Immunogenetics Specialist. I specialize in tissue typing for organ and bone marrow transplants and also for disease associations with the tissue typing. I have been doing that for 21 years in the same lab. Anyway, my work didn’t have the ETA yet they were just giving me advance notice. It had already been delayed twice. I was pretty hot and so bright I couldn't read my messages on my phone. So I found a shady spot to be able to read my messages. I sat down on the edge of a concrete slab poured to prevent erosion. It was a peaceful little place with the water running over the rocks. A tree was perched on the edge of the bank above me. I snapped this pic of Joe while I was sitting there reading my messages, replying and waiting for the response. We went on hunting while I waited to hear back on the ETA of the heart donor's tissue. Joe was the first to find something. He found a pretty little red ammonite about 1.5 inches across with a bit of matrix still on it. It was probably less than 30 feet from where Joe is in this pic. He offered it to me. I told him no way that it was his little memento of the hunt. If he found nothing else worthy of keeping that little beauty was worthy of keeping. I didn't get a pic of it. Maybe Joe can provide one. We continued with the hunt. I am not fast about covering ground while hunting, but I definitely move faster than Joe. Shortly after we got into the creek and began to hunt I got a call from the on call supervisor at my work telling me that the sample would be there around 6:00. That meant I had maybe 45 minutes left to hunt. We’d only been in the creek maybe 10 minutes max. Since I knew my time hunting would be cut short I was trying to cover more ground. I soon left Joe inspecting an exposure and moved on to another exposure further down the creek. I found a number of ammonite fragments. I found several halves of ammonites. Here are a few of them. The two ammonite halves were within 1 inch of each other along with the baculite fragment. I assume they are both Metoicoceras of some kind. Please chime in if you know what they are. I think this one must be a Placenticeras pseudoplacenta var. occidentale. Please help educate me if I am misidentifying them. I am very new at this. Sometimes I assume a species based on what I know is in the formation if it kind of looks like it. I am doing that with this one. I don't know of another smooth genus in the Britton. I also found a few more interesting bulbous concretion. Almost all of the concretion material are flat little slabs of rock not more than ½ to 1 inch thick, but occasionally you find little odd shaped ones or bumpy ones. I picked some of them up hoping I can figure out how to expose whatever may be inside. I found a few more baculite pieces. I found the longest fragment I had found. I also found a few tiny gastropods. Very cute and tiny. Here are pics of all the baculite fragments found over the 3 days. I am probably not the idea naturalist for combining the fossils from 3 hunts within a week from the same local. The largest fragment I did find when I hunted with Joe. This is one of the fragments. When it is wet it looks like shiny copper. When dry it looks like a metallic rose gold. It is lovely piece. I have a few others that have flecks of it on them. A few have a rainbow kind of hue. OK I am trying to break up my posts for this trip so I can include more pictures. Bare with me. More is coming. Oops left out a pic description. These are a number of the fragments I found that day with the exception of the Placenticeras ones.

My wife and I went to North Texas with the main lure being to collect on the N. Sulphur River. Since we were staying in Sherman we also visited Post Oak Creek. Lake Texoma was high on the list since we were so close, but prior posts about Texoma dissuaded us to " not take any chances ". At the time, people were stating the Lake Texoma Army Corp. of Engineers considered it a no-no regarding the removal of Ammonites from Corp. property. Since that time several years ago I have read multiple posts about collecting there but no caveats. We certainly have more trips to Texas from Missouri / Misery, and collecting at Lake Texoma would certainly be a destination. Set me straight...................

I went hunting Tuesday before last to a new place over in Benbrook, TX about an hour away. A newer TFF member, Cory had blind messaged me telling me about a place over near Ft. Worth. He thought I might be interested in seeing them. He invited me to come check it out. I get messaged a lot on social medial by complete strangers. So that part was nothing new. I don’t respond to the majority of the messages. With all of the messages I have gotten I have never had a stranger invite me to meet him somewhere, but that was basically the scenario. Sounds like the perfect scenario for something bad to happen though. So I was a bit leery. I didn’t intend to go, but I checked out his post to see what he was finding at the site. It was a lot of the typical Duck Creek ammonites and echinoids. The echinoids intrigued me. I had quite a few of that kind, but the quality was better than what I had. Also, the Mortoniceras ammonites were of good size and quality. The ones I have are fairly small. I have more Eopachydiscus than any other ammonite. So those did not hold much appeal. In his post he had invited other people to come check the place out so that made me feel a bit better. I'm still not sure how he found me or why he messaged me. Maybe it was one of my posts from a fossil hunt over in Ft. Worth he had seen. I had requested the day off work for that Tuesday weeks before to run some errands and go to an event, but the event got canceled so I had some extra time I didn’t expect to have. I was bummed that the event got canceled. Nature and the outdoors are my happy places. Fossil hunting cheers me even more. So I thought of places I could go. I had to be back by 5:00 though to pick up my daughter. So I couldn’t heard out to NSR. I decided to take a chance and head over to the place in Benbrook. I PM'd Cory on TFF and he sent me the address and his telephone number. I messaged someone to let them know where I was going and what time I planned to leave. It was in an open construction area and other people would be around so that helped put my mind at ease. I don’t tend to be paranoid about harm from strangers, but I like to be safe. I am a person of faith and I tend to hold the philosophy that if it isn’t your time to go nothing will happen to you. If it is your time to go, there is nothing you can do to stop it. I know a lot of women who limit themselves in where they can go and what they can do out of fear of what may happen to them if they go somewhere alone. I don’t fit in that category of not going out of fear. It may put me at greater risk, but so far I haven't come to harm only by the grace of God I am sure. Since the place was a new development it didn’t come up on my map apps. I had to wing it and used the satellite view to find the general area under development. I pulled into the development. It was quite large. Between the 2 sections it looked like it could easily be 150 acres if not more. Maybe only about 20% of the lots had homes on them. I had no idea where Cory was or how to find him. I was ok hunting without bothering him at work. I was still uneasy about it, but I thought I should meet him to thank him for letting me know about the site and inviting me. I am a pretty shy person. Breaking the ice is the hardest thing for me. I feel awkward and am afraid I won't know what to say, I'll say something stupid or I'll say something and there will be one of those awkward silences. But I let the rules of proper social decorum motivate me to break the ice and go meet him. He had also said he had a lot of questions about the fossils. I told him I wasn’t sure I could answers his questions, but I’d try to answer what I could. I wanted to keep my word. I parked my car on a corner surrounded by vacant lots. I messaged him to let him know I was there providing him with the street names on the signs on the corner. I got out and walked around. Within the first 5-7 minutes of walking around I found 2 decent little ammonites, which I believe are both Mortoniceras. One has more prominent tubercles than the other. Here’s the first I little ammonite I found on top of a fragment from a large Eopachydiscus. I am holding them my hand, but the fragment is so big you can barley see my hand is there. The little ammonite is 9 cm across. About that time he messaged me back and then tried to describe how to get to him. I told him I’d hunt where I was a bit longer and then come over to where he was. While I hunted around I snapped pics of the flowers and plants. Here are a few. This looks a little like phlox, but I’m not sure if it is since phlox was out in early April. Also, these are on a single stalk densely covered with small leaves. The phlox I know don’t look like that Not sure what this, but it looks cool. The leaves are fuzzy. The shoots are 12-15 inches tall. This is a Texas thistle. Believe it or not this is my favorite wildflower. The blooms can be up to 2 inches across and occasionally 2.5. They look a bit like pompoms, but aren’t quite so round. The color is just a bit off in the pic though. They are slightly more of a fuchsia color. They’re pretty cool looking. The plant is very prickly as you can see in the pic. They are difficult to pick. I usually have to take thick rubber gloves and use garden clippers. The look is not what made them my favorite flower though. It is their behavior and movement that I find so intriguing and mysterious. The first time I picked a bouquet of these I arranged them in a vase and made a nice rounded bouquet. When I got up in the morning they were completely rearranged. I asked my kids if they had played with them. They had not. I rearranged them into a nice rounded bouquet and went about my day. A couple hours later I noticed it was rearranged again. I don’t know what makes them move. It is not phototropism or the typical type of chemotaxis. They will move themselves at night and may move as much as 2 inches in 8 hours. It is astonishing and quite remarkable to me. I love it! They have an independent spirit, kind of like me. I remember we had a form of these growing on the edge of the forest in the clearing where our house was when I was a girl living in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas. The bears use to come into the clearing to eat these. They look like they would be very painful to eat, but the bears seemed to love them for their sweetness. I’ve never eaten one, but they smell delightfully sweet almost like honey.

I was moving some stuff around and doing a small bit of cleanup to make some room on my prep bench. Ran into a very nice little finished crab which i had forgotten about, and also ran into this multi ammo rock that ive been working on from time to time and then It got buried and forgotten. Put in about 3 hours of rock removal and its starting to look like something now. Its got a long ways to go still, but at least its finally gettin there. Where ever 'there' is. Ha!!! Anyways, I removed a heck of alot of rock from this rock after gluing it back together. Just glad I wasnt keeping track of the hours! RB

Hi friends, I'm Glauco Pereira...I've been collected fossils since 2013. I have a simple collection of fossils worldwide, but mainly from USA, Morocco and UK. I'd like to learn more with the members of this group. Cheers!

It's usually tough to be a new member of a forum with little field experience to share. By way of introduction, I am retired and live in St Helens, just a stone's throw from Pittsburg and Keasey. I found my first fossil in upstate New York as a child. My interest has been dormant for nearly sixty years because life got in the way. I hope to change that this summer, with a float trip on the Nehalem River and an extended camping and rock hounding trip into the John Day country of eastern Oregon on tap for this summer. I hope to become a regular contributor eventually but for now I must remain a newbie. I am looking for company on my trips and look forward to meeting traveling members as well as fellow Oregonians. Thanks for the opportunity to participate!