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What an adventure! I was on a trip to southern California with my partner. He does not like fossil hunting – yes I know what you are thinking but he is a very nice guy. You can’t have every thing! I wanted to go to the Marble Mountain Trilobite site in the Mohave desert. I did my research and knew exactly where I wanted to go. As I would be by myself I decided to be very clear about where I was going and how long I expected to be there. Off I went on a bright warm sunny day armed with gallons of water, a sunhat, fossil hunting backpack, many snacks, and a brand new Lexus. Yes I know you are thinking dumb dumb dumb! But as it turns out the lexus was an excellent choice, it had lots of power and reasonable clearance. I did high center it on some shrubs (sorry shrubs) and almost lost it in a sand bank. Power does win the day and I managed to get it about 3 miles away from the classic north end site by Chambliss. What I did not account for was that the recent atmospheric rivers had washed out a lot of the tracks and roads. I had a really big walk up to the base of the mountain. From there I struggled through boulders fields and scree slopes to get up to the famous red and green Latham shales. Oh boy what incredible rocks! Fortunately I am fond of lapidary too so I collected some glorious specimens. My aim was to find the blue green algal nodules formed by precipitation of the cyanobacteria. They look like elongated ovals and are found everywhere. I was gob smacked by these fossils. They are 518 million years old. The trilobites are mostly Olenellids and are rare. I struggled to find any of these and found mostly cool trace fossils. As I was completely exhausted getting to the top of this mountain and now had to get down it with a lot of rocks AND walk 3 miles across the desert to get back to the Lexus I made a decision – I would come back another day and find some of those trilobites. By the time I got back to the car my knees were shaking and I had drunk 5 litres of water and eaten everything I brought plus 3 candy bars. It was an amazing trip and the area is totally deserted. I never saw one person or vehicle while I was there. There is another trilobite site that is down towards the ghost town of Cadiz. This is the official BLM site and you are allowed to take small quantities of fossils. Unfortunately the road was completely washed out and unlikely to be repaired soon. Oh well that's for another day

Hi, i've just used my first binocular yesterday and decided to take a look on the pieces of schist i had collected in La Maurerie, member of the Coulouma formation, Cambrian, Montagne Noire, France. I need help to find out what i saw on them. Firstly, i splitted a piece of schist in two yesterday and found those tiny rounded things that puzzle me a lot. The whole of them form a shape of a little less than a centimeter. I also found that partial cephalon of one centimeter (part and counterpart) and wondered if it was from a Solenopleuridae or Trinucleidae. This really tiny pygidium of a few millimeters, i thought it could be from a Raphiophoridae or Dalmanitidae This one, a little bigger And that cheek and eye (the supposed eye is half a centimeter) @piranha @Kane

Hi all, I haven’t been here in a while, but I still wanted to share some fantastic finds from this summer. As soon as I returned from Newfoundland, I hit the ground running, and now I finally have a chance to relax with a hectic semester coming to a close. For some background, my undergraduate thesis looks at the structures and stratigraphy of a small peninsula off the western coast of Newfoundland called Cow Head. On our long trek up there, we stopped at Green Point, a global geologic benchmark for the boundary between the Cambrian and Ordovician. The geologic features here were unmatched. After our time in Green Point, we drove to Cow Head and quickly began conducting our research. Part of the fieldwork on the stratigraphy side included fossil hunting. Cow Head was full of different fossils, including graptolites, brachiopods, gastropods, and even trilobites. Unfortunately, like the trilobites in Pennsylvania, these too have eluded me. I did, however, find a copious amount of graptolites and even two gastropods! The graptolites included species such as Monograptus, Didymograptus, Phyllograptus, and the Dictyonema. There was none more important than the Tetragraptus Approximatus. This little guy is Floian in age, found within the Ordovician Period, and you can only see this fossil in Ordovician rocks. This made finding it crucial because the Cambrian/Ordovician boundary has been questionable on the peninsula for quite some time. If we saw Tetragraptus, we knew precisely what age of rock we were working in and could even possibly pinpoint the contact with further interpretation of other data collected. (Tetragraptus is the guy that looks like " >< " it is a little small, so you'll have to bare with me) Other fossils found were not nearly as important but just as exciting to discover. A common fossil that we saw often was the Monograptus; fun fact, Monograptus was one of the last stages of graptoloid evolution before their inevitable extinction. Monograptus is known for its single, uniserial stipes with intricate thecae. Another graptolite we saw was the Dictyonema, which can be seen in the image below on the lower portion of the rock. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find an outstanding samples of the Dictyonema. Maybe that will be a mini goal when I return this summer. Moving on from the graptolites to the gastropods, there is something exciting about these fossils. At the time of deposition, Cow Head was on the shelf edge of the Iapetus Ocean, which is why we see the laminated shale and limestone beds. Since it was on the shelf edge, there were a lot of clastic flows that produced the conglomerates that we see today. The complicated thing about these gastropods is that they were found within a conglomerate, just like where the trilobites have been seen. That implies that the gastropods and trilobites are not in their original locality of deposition and that they began to fossilize before being deposited in a clastic flow. The left gastropod is a little harder to see than the right one, but they are still impeccable finds on the peninsula nonetheless. We will collect them this upcoming summer and bring them back for further analysis. (Yes, they are still up there. It was a hefty rock in the thick of the peninsula.) I managed to find a nice sample with a bunch of Phyllograptus. The only issue was it was a large sample, and it couldn’t fit in our bags (it was an hour into fieldwork, so we didn’t want to carry it all day), so we broke it up and will be gluing it back together soon. This is what happens when you’re doing a geologic project with three other geologist, and you’re the only one who cares about fossils! The last possible fossil I would like to mention is this (image below, referring to a dark object in the middle of the rock). I am stumped to identify it, I have done reading and haven’t been able to figure it out, and I don’t even know what we did with it! I will have to check my lab as soon as possible because I forgot this guy existed. I would love to get the dimensions to anyone who may have an idea… if it is even a fossil. Any insight is greatly appreciated! The figure below is a diagram showcasing all the graptolites that can be seen in the area. It is difficult to capture a good enough image, so diagrams are very helpful for untrained eyes. Those were all the fossils I managed to find during my time on Cow Head. There is still a long way to go with my thesis work, so if anyone is interested in how it’s going, please reach out! I would love to discuss it with anyone interested! I will be returning to Cow Head and exploring more of Newfoundland this upcoming summer, there are some remarkable fossils to be seen, and I am super excited to share them with you! Thank you for taking the time to read this hefty post, I hope you enjoyed it! I have one more planned for my time out in North Dakota and that’ll be the end of my novels as posts. Happy Fossil Hunting, Dawson

I'm looking at an unknown trilobite from the Chengjang site in China and it has this weird looking thing on the thorax. Is it a fossil, and if so what is it?

Hello, Fellow Fossil Enthusiasts! I'm hoping that someone here might be able to help me in identifying these fossils, because I have hundreds of them in various stages of development, and in all of my research I have yet to find anything that remotely resembles what I've got! That is, until I found this forum - I've seen a few fossils identified here that were the very first that closely resembled what I've found, so my hope has been renewed that someone out there can help me out. I look forward to what new information might come my way! Scott

I'm looking at purchising a fossil that is labeled anomalocarid. It's not super well preserved, but looks like part of an anomalcarid arm. Is it an anomalocarid or something else.

Hi everyone, I was wondering if there were any well know cambrian burgess-shale-like fossils collecting localities that aren't protected by any laws (i.e. Burgess shale has video cameras etc.) or that aren't simply too remote to be accessed easily (i.e. Sirius Passet is in northern greenland). Thanks for everyone thoughts and opinions!

Hi Everyone, Over the summer I went searching for remnants of the elusive Cambrian trilobites from Massachuetts. The quarry these came from was destroyed back in the 1940s and new material is largely non-existant, but I may have found a Paradoxides cephalon. The tricky part being that when I split the piece of argillite, portions of the fossil were split between the two halves of the rock and the fossil could benefit from some prep work in general to make it more apparent. I lack both the prep skills and tools to take this one on and am wondering if anyone would be willing to glue the halves together and prep this mystery fossil out for me! I'd of course pay the going hourly rate for such work. Here's a link to the topic sbout IDing this mystery fossil and some pictures of the two halves of rock. While I had been talking with curator of invert paleontology over at Harvard about IDing this one, we aren't 100% sure it's a Paradoxides cephalon without the fossil being cleaned/preped, but are definitely leaning that way. Although not a complete specimen and one that will likely cost more to prep than it's worth, if it is a piece of these elusive trilobites it would be quite sentimental to me . Thanks for taking a look! Best, Barret