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So I am looking for this particular urchin. My grandmother found one when she was a child on the Brazos River outside of Waco TX. Her father sold it to a family friend in the late 1930's and so all I got were the stories of this big round rock that she thought had been "carved by Indians, decorated with dots and snakes". Only much later did she find out that it was a fossilized sea urchin. I am guessing it was a Cidarid, possibly Phyllacanthus or or Paracidaris. All I know is I am determined to find one someday. I would trade my entire collection of fossils for one of those big echies. (If anyone happens to have one just laying around.....let's talk! hahah) . I have been trying to learn the different formations and I stalk the Fossil Forum regularly to learn what I can. When I saw a post by @KimTexan about a Cidarid ID I realized she had found what I had been looking for! (Kim, I am so very jealous of your find!) So, my husband and I set out on one of our "little hunting trips" - we like to take two or three day excursions around Texas - he gets to go ghost hunting at night (we stay at haunted hotels and B&B's) and I get to go fossking during the day. I mapped out some likely spots and we set out from our little town of San Marcos heading north to HIllsboro (excellent home made icecream at A Tisket A Tasket on the Courthouse Square) and then to Granbury where we stayed at the Nutt House Hotel. Stopped at two spots that I thought likely to find my urchin but alas. No luck. Found some nice heart urchins and some "new to me" oysters and a couple of nice chucks of ammonites. I think this was Washita formation? I am using the Rockd App on my phone to try to pinpoint formation since I am definitely not familiar with formations, especially up "north". One of my happy finds was a Pinna Comancheana (far left "cone shaped" fossil) I've only found one other of those. Next morning we headed up to Lake Benbrook Spillway with a stopover at a large roadcut on "Scorpion Hill". This I believe was Glen Rose as most of the finds were heart urchins and gastros. Nothing new to me here, but I did find some better specimens than I had collected previously. Lake Benbrook was a neat place. Two other fossikers were out, I went over to say hello, wondering if they were experienced hunters and knew the area, but nope, they were new to Lake Benbrook, just as I was. I did not get to catch up with them after to see if they found anything good. I was amazed a the large ammonite impressions in the limestone beds. My camera wasn't working, so alas, no pictures. Found lots of nice Oxytopodiceras fragments and a couple of others I haven't identified yet. Pics in next post:

Found this today in Benbrook TX. The area is Cretaceous.

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.

Found these cone shaped fossils in the Goodland Formation, Lower Cret., in Benbrook, TX just south of Fort Worth. They are about one half inch wide and about the same tall with a concave underside. Found among gastropods, heart urchins, and oxytropidoceras ammonites. 1. Also found are these tube shaped fossils about half inch long and about 1/4 inch in diameter. They have long tube shaped lines along their sides. 2. Thanks in advance for your help.