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Hello everyone, Firstly excuse my very low level in English. I hope it's readable. My name is Pascal. I am 33 years old. I am from Switzerland I mainly collect sea urchins, brachiopods and fish teeth. My main research areas are Switzerland and France. I hope to have a good time with you on this forum

As it is a sunny day, this morning I decided to take a walk out back beyond my house to my little reliable spot of imported lower to mid Devonian fill. I wanted to see how much had weathered out since last season, and to try out a few more rocks that span from Bois Blanc Formation up through the Dundee Formation. As always, I was on the look-out for trilobites. The scene from near the base of the hills: The pit still has a bit too much snow to bother with, so I stuck with probing the hills and its gullies. A lot of the rocks were still frozen into the ground, so hammering a few out was necessary. A sure sign that spring is imminent. Here in southwestern Ontario, usually the first plants to come out (even before crocuses) is this dandelion mimic, Colt's Foot (Tussilago farfara). Only a few isolated clusters were appearing today, but by a week these hills and many other locations with scrabble will be full of these. (continued)

Hello, all! So I am cleaning out my workshop to make room for a lot of new material coming in and to prepare for the upcoming season. I have wayyyyyy too much Penn Dixie material. I have, at this point, committed all of my complete bugs away. But I still have quite literally, TONS, of other material. What I am offering is Edlredgeops rana partials, this includes entire prepped bugs that are missing cephalons, stand alone cephalons, pygidiums, large but broken cephalons, half bugs, etc. (Please note, I am not offering any of these as complete. There is the real chance that some of the unprepped material COULD be complete, but I am not offering them as such. I also have Greenops pygidiums and partials, beat up examples with broken cephalons, etc. I also have a few Bellacartwrightia pygidiums laying around, and perhaps a few broken and partials of them as well. I also have massive quantities of hash plates from the Bay View coral layer, brachipods (Mucrospirifer, Pseudoatrypa, Rhipidomella, Spinatrypa), Spyroceras cephalopod partials, rugose and tablulate corals, clams, and other random bits. I am interested in trading for similar material from other locales. I am not expecting anyone to offer up prime specimens for any of this material, but I would love anyone else's throw-aways that include vertebrate material, plants, small fish, and the like. I am also considering minerals and gems. (Again, throw-aways are all I'm looking for, quantity beats quality on this one.) I will cover shipping domestically in the US, but can't really afford to ship out a ton of international packages this month. (I will still do international, we just might have to work something out.) If anyone is interested, please message me! I want this stuff gone as quickly as possible, it's getting to the point where I can't walk in my workshop anymore! If you let me know what you're interested in I will take photos of some examples, but it would take me a full weekend at least to photograph everything that I have available. This is perfect for anyone wanting to practice prepping as the Windom shale that most of these bits are in is relatively easy to work and there are lots of attractive pieces that will look very nice prepped, just aren't worth the time and effort for me at this point. Cheers!

I was quite excited last week when I decided to take a day trip to Paulding, Ohio, where the La Farge Quarry mining company has dumped loads of rocks on a parcel of county land. This is a Devonian silica shale site. It was a very disappointing trip. I was out there for three hours with a 35 degree wind chill, and found nothing more than a few brachiopods, some horn coral and lots of rocks with fossiliferous matrices. The only trilobite I found crumbled in my palm as I poured some water on it to wash away some dirt. There were some rocks with trilobite parts, but no complete specimens. It's a huge site -- five or six parallel piles 100 yards or more long -- but I had very little luck. I've seen photos of other diggers who walked away with nice hauls, but I struck out. Though it was in late February, it looked as though the site was pretty well picked over. I'm planning a trip to southern Indiana later this spring. I'm hoping it will be more fruitful.

I have two brachiopods that need IDs. The lighter one was found in the Galena/ Ordovician rock outcrop of NE Iowa. The darker one from Decorah Shale/ Ordovician. I am sure @Herb will have an answer!! Can anyone else beat him to the solution? Thanks, Mike

Can anybody identify the first two? My father always wanted to keep them outside told him not to.........maybe I'll finally change his mind.

Currently going through old bins and looking to downsize the collection to make room for new specimens. Up for trade are fossils from Penn Dixie. 1. Several Eldredgeops rana partials, some of them near complete. Ideal for preparation practice. 2. Plenty of brachiopods from that formation. The picture is not representative of the numerous specimens of these I have on hand (around 1,000), most of them complete or having some minor damage. There are 5-6 distinct species, but mostly have abundant examples of Spinatrypa spinosa, Mediospirifer audaculus, Athyris spiriferioides, and some Mucrospirifer mucronataus. If it sweetens the pot a little, I also have plenty of spirifers from Arkona. I can split these up in any amount. In return, I'm always on the look-out for trilobite species I don't yet have. I'm absolutely fine on receiving partials of more common species (such as those from Oklahoma or Ohio). If there is any desire for horn corals, let me know. Send me a PM if interested.

My daughter asked me to take her fossil hunting today. She has never asked me to take her before so I was excited to take her out. She’s only 13. We drove up to Grayson County where I knew we would be sure to find something. We went to a creek where there were about 4-5 different formations or layers visible. Near the top though was a red layer. I didn’t find anything of interest in the red layer while in the creek. But when we returned to the car I decided to look around at the hillside and found something I didn’t expect to see there. I have been to this creek before. It has more oysters than I’ve ever seen in my life. It has a few varieties of ammonites and some echinoids and Inoceramus clams and that is about it. Next to where I parked my car there was a drainage ditch with red dirt and sitting there in the drainage ditch was this cluster of brachiopods. I would appreciate it if anyone could tell me what they are. One side of the cluster is red. This is the red side. The largest one is about 4 cm wide.

Today I decided to drive about 150 miles round trip to go to an auction that sometimes has fossils. This time there was only a Riker mount of composite Spinosaurus teeth and a huge ammonite that hardly fit into a banana box. I believe that the ammonite might have come from Texas and it looked like it weighed +120 lbs. Neither of these items sparked my interest, and since it was a sunny, 55 degree day, I decided to stop at a couple road cuts that I had visited earlier in the year. The first road cut (Site 1) is near Oglesby, Illinois and is located right next to the former Lonestar Quarry, that contains limestone from the Pennsylvanian Bond and Mattoon formations. The second (site 2) is about 5 minutes away and appears to contain the same type of fossils, just in better shape, since I have yet to find any loose fossils here. On my way back home I drove by Site 1 again and met Fossil Forum member @Siwash and his family collecting. Composita argentia Brachiopod Juresania nebrascensis Brachiopod Punctospirifer kentuckyensis Brachiopod (?)

Hello, I see all the great trilobite preps that people have done on specimens found at Penn Dixie and I was just wondering whether anyone puts the same amount of effort on any of the brachiopods or corals (or other things for that matter) that come out of that site. Specifically, I am curious whether you can use the same air abrasion techniques or if the fossil left behind from these brachiopods and corals is not as dense as the trilobites and therefore just gets destroyed by the use of air abrasion. If anyone has used a similar technique on brachiopods or corals I would be interested in hearing these sucess stories and seeing some of the finished products. I have been using manual tools (picks, needles, etc.) thus far with decent results but always looking to up my game. Thanks, Microtooth

My beautiful wife scheduled a three night stay at a cabin in a Thousand Trails campground near Lake Texoma. We were to arrive on Sunday and check out on Wednesday. So, I figured that, since I hadn't been fossil hunting in months, I would schedule a trip to central Texas to follow the Texoma trip. I set up a rendezvous point in Fairfield, Texas to meet my dad on that Wednesday, and head off toward Brownwood and Cisco, Texas. I figured that the fossil hunt would begin then. But that's not quite how things played out... My two oldest daughters and I met my wife and youngest daughter in Salado, Texas on Saturday, October 14th. They had left the previous morning to spend a day with my mother-in-law in Waco and Salado. We spent Saturday night in Salado and then parted ways with my mother-in-law on Sunday morning and headed toward Lake Texoma. As we drove through Waco, my wife asked if we wanted to take a detour. She had never been to Dinosaur Valley State Park in Glen Rose, Texas, and she thought the girls would enjoy seeing the dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River. I got really excited. I hadn't been there since I was a kid, and at that time, the river was high and the tracks were not visible. So we adjusted our GPS to take us to Glen Rose. We pulled in and stopped off to get a map of the park. We then drove straight to the spot where Roland T. Bird made his first discovery. It was amazing. The water was low and gave us a clear view of the trackways in the river. Above you can see both the sauropod and theropod tracks, They are a little obscured by mud, but they are still very visible. We left the R.T. Bird site and went to another place called the Ballroom Track Site, where so many tracks go in so many directions, it was like the theropods were dancing. It was in slightly deeper water, but it was still beautiful! The rippling water was crystal clear and the girls couldn't help but get into the water, even as a cool front brought chilly winds down the river valley. My wife loved it. She told me that Dinosaur Valley State Park was our next camping destination. Before we left, we stopped off by the iconic Tyrannosaurus Rex and Apatosaurus models built for the 1964-65 World's Fair in New York. They were permanently installed at Dinosaur Valley in 1970 at the park's dedication. We left Dinosaur Valley and drove the rest of the way to our cabin at Lake Texoma, arriving just after dark. We settled in and tried to decide what we wanted to do the next day. It was Monday, and we figured there had to be something for the girls to do nearby. We quickly discovered that our options were limited. It had turned too cold for the pool at the campgrounds. The putt-putt at the campground was okay, but the girls quickly tired of it. And most of the other recreational equipment was not well kept, or available. So, we decided to leave the campground to find something for the girls to do. I had mentioned that I would like to check out the Permian site at Waurika, Oklahoma. It was only two hours away, and this was the closest I had ever been to the site. My wife was a bit miffed by the lack of things for the girls to do, so she said "Let's go." I jumped at the chance. I had done no research on the site, other than what I had read about it on TFF. I wish I had consulted the TFF experts before we left, because I had no idea of the best places to look. We focused mainly on the sandy floor and reddish rocks, and found nothing. When we returned to the cabin, I asked where we should have looked. Jesuslover340 informed me that the gray colored exposures were the places to find the best material. So, we came away empty handed, with only one major discovery. My wife wouldn't let me take it home, though... Continued in next post...

This is probably a rookie question, so I ask for your indulgence. I have several thousand fossils collected over 50 years. I have a couple of hundred that I keep in plastic storage boxes in the house (crinoid stems and segments, bivalves, some horn coral and other corals, the one trilobite that I purchased that is probably a fake). But the rest are outside in a rock garden in the backyard. We're talking about a lot of fossils. The first question is: When you have so many fossils, what do you do with them all? And secondly, I have many fossils found in clay (see images). Will the elements have any negative effect on them? I live in Michigan, so we get lots of rain, snow and freezing temperatures.

Today I spent about two hours near Lawrenceburg, Indiana collecting some Ordovician fossils. I had a lot of luck with collecting some great looking complete brachiopods that I believe might be Herbertella, but I am going to ask the experts @Herb and @Peat Burns on this formation and see if they can correct any mistakes or unidentified finds. Rafinesquina ponderosa Platystrophia? It was bryozoan heaven today, as shown by some of the pics below. One piece was extremely large. Trilobites Parts ? Gastropods- "Sinuites" Unknown ? And some very nice small hash plates that are probably my favorite fines of the day.

Last week I drove out to Kentucky to spend a week with my family. Of course I also hit the fossil beds. The first day I visited the two Mississippian sites- Wax and Leitchfield that I visited last year. Here are some of the highlight finds of that day. First- Wax: Blastoids and bryozoans:

After making a stop at the Anna Roadcut, I drove about 15 minutes to Vienna, Illinois where there is a roadcut at the entrance to Interstate 24. This rock is supposed to Be Mississippian Menard Limestone. At this location I also found some nice hash plates, my biggest blastoid of the day, Horn coral, Archimedes’ screw, bryozoan and brachiopods.

Today I was in Southern Illinois and made a Quick stop at a road cut near Anna, Illinois, just off of Interstate 57. This exposure is: Upper Mississippian Middle Chesterian Series Golconda Formation Harvey Member I found a few nice hash plates and some blastoids, Archimedes’ screw, brachiopods, Horn coral, Bryozoan, crinoid stems and one trilobite pygidium.

Hello all, Another small project completed for our seemingly never ending study of the Lower Permian Fort Apache Limestone east of Payson Arizona. This week, we have put together all the images and data from the hordes of productids (with spines) and one teensy brach found in the acid fines. Brachiopods are a minor faunal element in the Fort Apache Limestones, nearly 100% were found as Productids and their hordes of tiny spines. Only ONE other brach was found, and it was microscopic in size at a size of 1 mm. No doubt the large amount of mud and silt raining down on the bottom of the Fort Apache Sea made life very difficult for any type of filter feeders. Largely missing as well are corals, crinoids and sponges which also feed by filtering the muddy waters. Only the Productids seemed to be adapted to such conditions. Both silicified and calcified fossils were found. Some of the silicified fossils were very delicate and had many of the spines still attached when dissolved out of the limestones with muriatic acid. Winters in his monumental GSA memoir 89 identifies the productids as Bellaclathrus spinosus, and the tiny brach as Pseudodielasma sp. Since this is a very generic looking brachiopod, well go with his identification. Pseudodielasma sp. top view, pedical valve. This brach is the size of a pinhead and is the only one found after processing over 200 pounds in limestones! 45x Pseudodielasma sp. bottom view, brachial valve. Here you can see the opening at the top for the pedicle to emerge for external support on a hard substrate. 45x Bellaclathrus spinosus, only about an inch across it is far smaller than the average size of the productids found in the overlying Permian Kaibab formation. This one is calcified on the surface of the limestone found by cracking open large rocks. 2x Bellaclathrus spinosus - very flat upper valve that is calcified. 3x Bellaclathrus spinosus - Silicified specimens show much external detail. But they are hollow and very delicate! Notice the spine coming off the wings. 2x Bellaclathrus spinosus - We found hordes of loose productid spines in the limestones. 7x Bellaclathrus spinosus - Close up at 20x of some of the spines. Most are hollow tubes, and never come to a point. In life they are filled with live tissue and the spines grow by adding on to the ends. Bellaclathrus spinosus - Two spines on a common base which was once the outermost layers in the productid shell. 20x. Well, thats it for this week. Hope you enjoyed our little presentation!

Had a great day out with Candace and Nick @thelivingdead531 @Barerootbonsai Friday 20th. Here are a few of my finds, I’ll post the hash plates when I’ve photographed them. We all got a great variety of finds, here are some of mine. I’m sure Nick and Candace will add to this thread.