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Found this in Comanche Peak limestone formation in Central Texas. I'm thinking Eoradiolites quadratus but not sure if there's enough info to nail down species. Apex to apex measures approximately 1.5 cm for three different samples. I will slowly post more pics of the other specimens, as I reduce photo sizes without losing quality. Thanks for your help.

My daughter and I are looking for new fossil-finding adventures in central and Northeast Texas. We have already been numerous times to Ladonia, Sherman and Mineral Wells. We also like to hunt for arrowheads!

Hey folks, If you are here in Central Texas today, the Texas Memorial Museum is having their annual Identification Day. 1-5 PM at the museum on the University of Texas campus, here in Austin. https://tmm.utexas.edu/events/3 I will be there along with some other members of the Paleontological Society of Austin to assist in identifying your fossils. We will be handling the invertebrates but there will be others helping with vertebrates, both fossil and extant, rocks and minerals, as well as artifacts and other natural items you might be curious about. TMM's Identification Day is part of the Austin Museum Partnership's annual Austin Museum Day, a FREE community-wide exploration of museums in and around Austin.

This peculiar thing caught my eye while I was out looking for urchins, clams, gastropods and all of the other bountiful fossil blessings of Central Texas. This was in an intermittent creek cut in the Comanche Peak formation, Lower Cretaceous period, western Bell County, Texas. The scale in the background is inches (sorry, no metric device readily available). The oval shape of the fossil is 1.5 cm by 1 cm. All of the lines you see making up the fossil are crystalized sediment within the limestone matrix. My 8 year old was excited about how "sparkly" it looked under the flashlight. In a couple of the pictures you can see what appears to be a very small section of the side of the fossil. I am stumped on this one. My hunch is that i'm seeing the inside of an organism that we typically get to see the outside of. But i don't know what the insides of the urchins look like. Seems too oval to be a cross section of phymosoma texanum. Maybe it was a plant or coral? Could it be a flattened-out, crystalized Parasmilia?

In the continuing saga of finding all the echinoids of Texas.....I found a few new things plus re-assessing my collection I found I already had another example (albeit small bits only) of another! So here are my latest finds (and re-finds). In my collection from Marathon Tx was a couple of bits of (I think) an Archeocidarid!! Stopped by a little creek in Austin and found this lovely Coenholectypus: Went on a little road trip to Glen Rose TX and found what I thought was a Loriolia but on closer inspection, it's a Goniopygus! Not a great specimen, but slightly better than my previous ones, so still looking for a nice one: And the piece de resistance : A Balanocidarid Spine!! Practically in my own backyard (well, within 30 minutes drive anyways)

Hello all!! Was in Bell County and found this little bit - Fredericksburg Group Cretaceous. It seems to have an interesting structure. Apparently some "fishy bits' have been found in the area...is that what I have? Thanks!

Hey all you local Central Texas folk. It's time for Fossil Fest. This is the annual show of the Paleontological Society of Austin. Next weekend, November 3 & 4, Round Rock, Texas. Family friendly, lots of stuff to see including displays by our members, including me, hourly door prizes, grand door prizes and a nice variety of dealers. Follow this link for details: https://austinpaleo.org/fest.html Hope to see you there. Erich Rose President, PSA

We found this working outside of Horseshoe Bay Texas. Can anybody identify it? thanks

Not a particularly exciting ID request, but these have been driving me crazy. I pick up tiny fragments of these in the North Sulphur River and Post Oak Creek, and picked up some bigger chunks while hunting in central Texas lately. On the "exterior" the striations run vertical, but on the cross sections the striations are horizontal. On larger chunks there are sometimes a layer of pocketed material on the back. Is it petrified wood, shell fragments, some type of enamel? I keep grabbing these things without knowing for sure what they are, and I'm ready to toss them if I can't figure it out. http://imgur.com/a/qwKtl Any help is appreciated. Thanks y'all!

I am in Belton, can anyone tell me exactly how to get to the Hejer Heights or Waco "sites"? I am just a mom looking for somewhere for her 6 year old to dig...! Thanks!!

Hey everyone, Weekend hobbyist here. Been doing most of my recent picking around Lampasas, really eager to find some new locations in the central Texas area. If anyone has any good leads on hunting spots within a 2 hour radius of Austin it'd be much appreciated. Really hoping to find some loriolias or heart urchins somewhere, and planning get up to Brownwood to search for ammonites. Some of my recent finds uploaded at the link below. A lot of gastropods and clam casts, occasionally some coral. Can anyone shed some light on what the reddish, rust-like deposits coating some of those gastropod shells I find are? http://imgur.com/a/qwoKy

Hello there, my name is Cameron and i'm starting this topic to have an open page for the flow of ideas and information about the possible formation of a Hill Country Fossil Club for San Antonio, Austin, and the surrounding areas . This idea has been proposed before on the forums, but it didn't work out, so i'm doing my best to pull everyone together to form some sort of club. It could be anything from an organized monthly meetup for group fossil hunting trips, guest speakers, etc. to a simple email list for members to invite a couple tag-alongs on their upcoming trips. However it takes shape, it'd be beneficial to alot of the central Texas members of the forum to form a local fossil community. So far, my idea is to maintain the facebook page created last time (for those who prefer facebook) and make an email and phone number list so each club member gets a reminder when someone plans an open-invite fossil hunting trip, or if there is a meeting coming up, or anything else of that nature. If interested in making a list, pm me your email and texting phone number with whatever name you like to be called. If alot of people prefer to meet first, thats fine too. Maybe we can make a field trip out of it. Just reply with your thoughts and let's all start exchanging ideas. If it doesnt work long-term again at least we have a few new locals to hunt with, lol.

Hi all! I had an excellent hunting trip up in Round Rock Texas with a friend yesterday. Lots of exogeria, small heart urchins, oyster shells and such. I did find one thing that I can't identify. It reminds me of a squished barnacle. The striations are on both sides. Any ideas?

I got in a nice sunset hunt last night. Heavy rain has washed a little of my hilltop spot away and I found some good stuff... A beautiful scallorn point, some 19th century glass, some shells, and a few unidentified things that caught my eye. They all either just looked out of place or appeared to have some form. Some might just be weathered rock. These were all found in Burnet County, Texas on the Eastern Edwards Plateau. I found a snapped stalactite base in this same formation so there might have been a cavern at some point at this spot. Thanks for looking.

I was visiting the local museum of a small town near San Antonio and found what I think is a mammoth tooth amid their collection. The curator just thought it was an unusual rock that had been donated before he came to the museum. In the exhibit, it was on the floor next to a crumbling tombstone. I took a few pictures with my phone, but did not think to include a scale. From memory, I'd say it is around 6-8" long, 4-5" wide, and about 3" deep. What do you think? Did I get it right?

Howdy all, I've had an account before (actually two, but I had to change email addresses), but I wasn't active at all. I'm currently a Geology student in Waco, Tx, so I decided to become active on the forum. My parents were fossil hunters, so I got introduced to paleontology before I could even walk. Other than the Shale Pit, I'm plagued with mostly molluscs. I have found a couple of locations for fossils and minerals, but one in particular has had my direct attention. It's a dried creek bed that has yielded a calcite vein, endless pyrite nodules, enough molluscs to make anyone sick, a couple of large ammonites, echinoid fragments, coral fragments, one annelid, and a strange coiled like structure with a greenish tint (It's not a gastropod! I'll post a picture when I have access to a camera). Far upstream I have found a tooth from a ray in the tumbled pebbles in the stream bed, but I have yet to locate where the vertebrate material came from. Sorry if I'm trailing off, that site has been the scourge of my existence since I arrived in Waco... I've done some hunting in Gatesville and Whiskey Bridge, but that sums up my Texas hunting. Of course, while I was a kid I accumulated a massive collection traveling the midwest, and more recently spent some time on the MCC Geology Field Course. While on the field course I had the opportunity to extract beautifully preserved Phytosaur teeth and other bone fragments from a conglomerate layer in the Redonda Formation. I also did some checking around between Tucumcari, NM and Moab, Utah, but couldn't find many legal locations to hunt. Holbrook, Az had a nice public location for petrified wood (bring a truck if you want the large pieces), but they may run you off despite it being public land. One other location near Springdale, Utah yielded nice dendrite, and supposedly had micro brittle stars. The land owner didn't want us excavating on his property this past year, but up to the bottom of the hill was public. Sadly, I didn't find the brittle stars. Sorry if I trailed off again. Anyway, I look forward to blogging (if that's the right term?)with yall. If anyone is passing through Waco and wants to hunt, let me know! I'm always up for some hunting! Also, I'd love to meet up with some of yall on one of my next excursions! One more thing, I'm currently planning a trip through Llano(gotta get some Llanite) to Mason. I may alter that trip to include San Saba (probably leave out the topaz hunt if I do that) for crinoids, trilobites, and stromatolite biohems sound so appealing. If anyone has any information about that area, advice, or wants to meet up to hit some local spots, it would be greatly welcome and appreciated. I found a couple sites that show locations for Llanite and outcrops for that area (one site was borrowed from an old thread). I'm done haha.

January 2, 2010 The Lower Cretaceous Glen Rose Formation (Kgr) of Central Texas is roughly 110 million years old. Its classic exposures look like man-made steps or solid blocks that are occasionally interrupted with softer rock or marl. The formation is typically divided into upper and lower units by a layer of Corbula fossil clams. Just below this layer was the destination I wanted to find for my first fossil hunt of the year. It takes its name from the isolated occurrence of an ornate fossil sea urchin - the Salenia texana zone! A bright dawn had not yet thawed the frost when I headed to meet my friend, Bob. He was excited to show me a new quarry where he had found echinoids the previous month. When we arrived at the site, he oriented me to the most productive layers in the formation, and we started hunting the youngest strata. I immediately began to find fossils. Erosion of the shelf, we were searching, left fragments of 'heart' urchins, gastropods, and bivalves everywhere. I was trying to be selective, looking for the better preserved specimens, but it was hard to pass up an unusual oyster or clam. Oyster (Ceratostreon weatherfordensis ?) with the partial mold of the shell where it was attached Juvenile Arctica sp. clam Soon, Bob was calling out, "Spiny urchin!" with periodic repetition. He wryly commented, "I just seem to be a magnet for those things." Meanwhile, I gouged my elbow on rock as I crawled along the ground. Glancing to check the damage, I spied one of the small, prickly echinoids. It was just one of those small moments...that capture your love of the outdoors. The late morning light was perfect, and when I reached for the camera, a little heart urchin caught my attention. Even better. So, I digitally captured the two 'echies' before putting them in my box. We finished the morning and the rest of the layer with several more echinoids and a partial crab claw. Loriolia texana echinoid with Orbitolina texana foram Heteraster obliquatus echinoid among Orbitolina texana forams Loriolia texana echinoid Some finds after a little cleaning From this area, we moved down into the "zone". A hard limestone bench capped a six foot thick layer of softer rock. It weathered into chunky clay before a transition back to solid stone. Even within this bracketed strata, I noted some subtle differences in the coloration and hardness. But meanwhile, Bob had started finding echinoids while I was "getting the lay of the land". The marble-sized Leptosalenia texana were eroding with regularity from the top half of the zone. A small, disk-like foram, known as Orbitolina texana, littered the ground. Scattered among them were a variety of different gastropods and a non-fossil caterpillar. Leptosalenia texana with forams and gastropods Caterpillar Leptosalenia texana echinoids Bob previously mentioned that he had found a couple of plates (a part of an urchin's shell) from a very uncommon echinoid on his last visit. So, as we leaned against the wall of the formation, I asked him what else he remembered. He described them as being more whitish in their preservation than some of the other finds we were making; and when he said it, I thought of the variation in the rock I had seen earlier. We had already found fragments of the spines which the 'Salenia' urchins used to protect their shells; but I was not tracking them - we were tracking a cidarid echinoid! In the Glen Rose Formation, two species have been described: Phyllacanthus texanus and P. tysoni. So, I grinned when I saw part of a larger, bumpy spine sticking out of the rock. About that time, Bob suggested that we move over a short distance to a fresh spot. Hunting anything, with success, requires identifying and following certain clues. In the new spot, I put my suspicions to the test. A few feet below the caprock, I found a lighter layer that was somewhat hidden by runoff from layers above. I flaked away the debris to get a better look and immediately started to find several spine fragments! I announced my excitement, "Cidarid spines!" Echinoid spines 5 cm echinoid spine in matrix A slightly elevated heart rate accompanied the anticipation of following signs in the rock. Then, I had an adrenalin spike when Bob called out, "You need to look at this." He walked toward me, and in his hand were 3 connected plates of our cidarid urchin quarry. I showed him some of the spines and explained the "hidden" layer we could focus on. I thought we were close to our treasure, and he asked if I had "covered" the area just to my right. I told him, "No, go ahead" as I knelt down for a look at some of the spines eroding from the ground. "JOHN!" I turned to see him stand up beside me with a golf ball-sized, knobby echinoid in his palm! "You did it!" I yelled. "You really...did it! Way to go!" We stood a moment, looking at the rare urchin with a range of emotions. Then, he handed me his prize while he went back to get his camera. I put it back in the spot he picked it from and took a few photos. When he came back, more photos ensued...it was an amazing Texas find! Although I know quite a few cidarid urchins have been found through the years, I am personally aware of just five...including Bob's - certainly not a common discovery. Checking a few references later indicated he had found a Phyllacanthus texanus! Bob's discovery Phyllacanthus texanus echinoid Well, as you can imagine, the adrenaline of discovery had us quickly back in search mode. More spines were found. I ravenously scanned the layer we isolated. Then, my "heart jumped in my throat" when I spotted the partial test (shell) of another Phyllacanthus! So close...but not this time. My Phyllacanthus texanus partial test Late into the fading light, we searched to no avail. The cool wind and darkness ended our efforts, and we congratulated each other with our goodbyes. Hopefully, with some weathering and heavy rain, we will get another chance to track the rare fossil urchins of the Glen Rose.