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Looking to have growths id present on late cretaceous wood. The growths are the scales present on the wood. They appear to have been growing between wood layers. Wood is partly carbonized and not fully mineralized. Wood was drift wood mixed in with baculites and scaphites. Fossil taken in situ from upper part of Kevin mb of Marias Fm in Montana.

I did a half day hunt in Northeast Texas. It was hot! The big flathead catfish was keeping me company.

Fun morning Northeast Texas hike with a heat index of almost 110 degs by the time I left after lunch. The Tylosaur vert is worn but huge and weighs close to 2 lbs. The Tylosaur jaw section was almost buried as you can tell from the in situ pic. The artifacts were a nice little bonus. I waked in tracks for over half the day so I would love to see what the first guy found.

Finally made a trip to the North Sulphur River. As a first timer, I went straight to the Ladonia Fossil Park. It has a large parking area with clear access to the river bottom. Keep in mind, the access is good, but the steps are HUGE. Going down isn't too difficult, but getting back up had me climbing them on my hands/knees. There is an ATV trail on the east side of the bridge that I was told has a more gradual slope, but you'll need to keep an eye open for snakes/insects, as its heavily overgrown with vegetation. I had a great time searching the river bed and banks for fossils. I found tons of baculite segments and lots of vertabrate bone fragments (likely mosasaur). Very few well preserved specimens with the majority worn beyond identification. Also found a few oyster shells, gastropods, and shark teeth. Tools aren't necessary, but you may want to carry scraping tool or a small pry bar for working the bank exposures. Screen boxes also come in handy for sifting through sediments in the river bed. A few words to the wise: - during spring/summer, be sure to wear sunscreen and stay hydrated - use a walking stick to steady yourself and for testing areas ahead of your walk path - try to stay on gravel bars, as the mud can be deep especially along edge of the banks - when walking through water between gravel bars try to avoid walking on shale layers as it is extremely slippery - be aware that there is lots of broken glass, concrete rubble, rusty metal, and other debris - for the above reasons and the fact that they are not very supportive, I would strongly advise against flip flops with firsthand knowledge (in the words of Jimmy Buffet, "I blew out my flip flop, stepped on a pop top........." ) And lastly, always check the water level of the river before making the trek - go to the National Weather Service for North Sulphur River near Cooper, TX (Gauge CPPT2) https://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=fwd&gage=cppt2&hydro_type=0 I can't wait to go back.

I had a fun hike at the North Sulphur River Texas yesterday. I figured it would be picked over but I found a pretty remote spot with my 4x4. The one sawfish tooth I found in a small creek a few days before. Everything else is from yesterday. It was a great day for Cretaceous coprolite (Poo). @GeschWhat The one coprolite is full of fish verts, bones and fins.

Going back to our fossil hunting trip at the end of September this year, it always amazes me to think of the forces involved in the evolution of our little planet. I had found a large chunk, about 10" in diameter, of shale/mud matrix with some baculite pieces sticking out at different angles. When I went to work in it over the past few days, the nature of the piece came to light. I can only imagine so many baculites being swept along in a flow of mud, crushing and splitting pieces; eventually coming to rest eventually creating the sedimentary formation. Then, how many years later, this formation is cracked by earth shaping forces, further splitting the pieces within the matrix, allowing veins of calcite to form? I am amazed at the number of pieces in this small sample. You can see how this became an index fossil for the K-T extinction event 66 mya.

Finally got a few hours to hunt around my local creek, I had found one mosasaur vert once before there so I decided to dig farther into the wall to see if there was more, to my surprise there was, the first one came out okay but the second one was really really crumbly. First one first

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 family found quite a few baculite sections last weekend (including the one attached) and thanks to the help from this group we now know what we have. We were not specifically fossil hunting when we found them and were not equipped to collect many of them. We are going back to the site this weekend (if the weather is favorable) and I’d love any suggestions for properly collecting these pieces. Ideally I’d like to piece some of the sections together once we are home for our personal enjoyment, education, and to see if we can assemble a complete (or near complete) baculite (probably wishful thinking, but it would be neat!). Some pieces aren’t in the best of shape (see attached image). How would you collect these sections? Would you leave the poorly preserved pieces? Any thoughts or tips are much appreciated!

Picked up several specimens during my exploration of what I believe to be a local outcropping of the Pierre Shale in Colorado Springs. A decently preserved Baculites for sure with nice sutures and an unknown fossil. Any help this one would be appreciated.

Another very successful trip to the Little Smoky River this year north of Valleyview, Alberta. River levels had finally receded and we were lucky to be one of the first to pick the banks for exposed baculites. They are mostly fragmented and I have yet to find a complete specimen. No matter the size their colours are brilliant from silvery white, blues, reds and greens. The shimmery colour catches your eye when they are wet and at the waters edge.

Fun North Sulphur River Texas hunt. The big Tylosaur tooth and coprolite were my favorite finds of the day.

Hi all, I had a chance to visit one of my favorite eastern North Carolina quarries today. This quarry contains exposures of the Cretaceous PeeDee Formation and Eocene Castle Hayne Formation. Overall was an outstanding day for everyone who attended. I was very fortunate to add 2 new species to my collection. First and my best find of the day, a Baculites vertebralis living chamber. Baculites along with all ammonites are extremely rare in North Carolina so this was an unexpected and day making find. Find of the day #2 and barely #2 an extremely rare Cretaceous echinoid, also a first for me. Lefortia trojana I also found more than a few Hardouinia kellumi's. An uncommon Cretaceous echinoid. From the Castle Hayne Eocene, Linthia wilmingtonensis. Unifascia carolinensis I also found this large, softball sized Cretaceous clam cast, from the PeeDee Formation. Trying to find an ID for it. There was lots of other things. 25 or so Hardouinia mortonis, a few shark teeth including 1 nice Squalicorax. Also some cool oysters, Flemingostrea and Exogyra and a real nice cretaceous angel shark vert, that I am having trouble photographing. I also captured this cool pic of a dragonfly taking a break. Great day in the sun, getting some good exercise finding fossils. Cannot ask for anything better than that.