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Trying to get someone to lead my wife and I in the right direction for a good day of fossil hunting. We live in the Knoxville/Oak Ridge area of East Tennessee. Any directions to good sites would be greatly appreciated. Any good prospects in our area? Thanks guys!!

Here's a crinoid I found the other day in the Menard Limestone (Chesterian series). I'm not so sure of what genus it may belong to.

Two questions here, what are general things to look for when deciding whether a fossil is fake or real? Guidance asked for especially when it comes to Moroccan imports, and mosasaur anything, crinoids, and trilobites, as well as pleistocene mammal fossils. The latter question, is there any massive list of information sort of like an identification guide for fossils? I saw this massive list fruitbat had and its very impressive and I shall put it to use, but i feel it's almost a little bit beyond me at certain times, is there any just general all encompassing guide to identification?

This may be a long shot, but here are a couple of crinoids I picked up at a roadcut near St. Louis. They aren't in the best condition, but they were a nice surprise. The roadcut exposes a portion of the Valmeyeran series (Mississippian).

Hey Guys, family member are going to meet up at Sodus Point, NY for an outing during June 7 thru June 11. Sodus Point is located on Lake Ontario east of Rochester. Although I know of some fossil hunting locations in upper NY, they are all located around Buffalo. I would like to take my 5 year old niece out on a fossil hunting excursion. She is well on her way to being a rock nut and wants to be the first paleontologist on Mars. Love it. If any of you guys know of some productive sites that would be kid friendly and would be willing to share the location(s) it would be greatly appreciated. If you'd like PM me. I am aware of the Penn Dixie site, but that may be too far to go. Thanks )s

I found several mixed pieces last weekend while out in southwest Virginia; bits that had tumbled down the hillside and into the road. This was along a road that follows the Holston River, in mostly limestone/shale. One piece was filled with crinoids (stems), from tiny to pencil diameter; one had meshy bryozoan pieces and brachiopods, then there was the piece that had this. Please bear with me, I've looked online, and in my books, but since I have no idea what I'm looking for, it complicates things, and I want to learn. In both examples, the coral-looking chamber/pore sections are alongside the mesh/bryozoan-looking sections, so I'm not even sure if I'm looking for one, or two separate, organisms. I'm sure whatever it is, it's probably very common in this area, but if someone could help ID it so I'll know next time, or at least point me in the direction of what I need to research, I'd be grateful. Thank you!

Hello everyone! I found this site because my son and I are constantly picking up rocks from our property with little fossils in them. Cool site...I look forward to chatting with you all!

Hi everyone, I've no exact location for this crinoid fossils, only just to say they are from the UK. Although there is some obvious crystal on the reverse and around the side if that's any help. Any additional help will be gladly received.

Last week, after checking the weather wunderground numerous times, I decided to drive 3.5 hours from Chicago to St. Paul Stone Quarry. It was the last "open house" day according to the ESCONI website. I arrived at 7:45, the first and only person there. Shortly thereafter, after a brief safety instruction, I followed the manager to the collecting site, heaps and heaps of Waldron shale. Even though I dressed in layers, I still had to take breaks and warm up in the car for a few minutes, but I much rather prefer collecting in cold weather as opposed to hot summer sun with mosquitoes, any day. It didn't take too long to start finding fossils. Here are just a few of my finds: Eospirifer Platystrophia brachiopods with pyrite Platyceras niagarense encrusted with strophomenid, bryozoa and pyrite. front: back: Partial Dalmanitid Trilobite in matrix When prepping, it's really wonderful how the waldron "butter" shale just crumbles apart around the predictable morphology of an enrolled trilobite. The trip just wouldn't seem complete without a short drive east to the Cincinnati Arch roadcuts. I first went to South Gate and found a flexicalymene eroding right out of the cut. It is interesting to see the comparisons here. The trilobite on the left is from St Paul (Silurian) and has beautiful pyritized eyes. The one on the right is from South Gate (Ordovician). Both trilobites have 21 articulated segments; does this make them both the same age as "adults"? Interesting to note the difference in size, being 40 million years apart, same species.. Thanks for looking!

sLast weekend I took a four day trip to Kentucky to see family; parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew. While there arranged to get together with Herb from the Forum to collect Mississippian Age fossils which I hadn't done before. There are no fossiliferous Mississippian Age deposits in New York and the nearest are in Western Pennsylvania hours away, so this looked like a good opportunity to add some marine fossils from that age to my collection. Fortunately where my family lives is in an area of marine Mississippian deposits. On the way to our rendezvous with Herb in E-Town (Elizabethtown) my nephew and I stopped at a road cut in Leitchfield that he knew about and had seen other collectors collecting at. Fossils were eroding out of the hillside by the score and could be picked up right off the ground free of the matrix. Collected a number crinoid stems, bryozoans, and small brachiopods. After an hour, we continued on to our meet up with Herb. My nephew had already met Herb at a collecting site. We continued on to another road cut collecting site about forty minutes away. Again, fossils were eroding out of the hillside and could be picked right up free of the matrix. Prior to this I had no blastoids in my collection but in just an hour and a half I'd collected fifteen plus more brachiopods, crinoid stems, and some more bryozoan specimens. We then returned to the first place in Leitchfield where my nephew and I visited earlier. Found more specimens including a number of crinoid calyxes, a couple blastoids, and a few more brachiopods and bryozoans. I'll have to study to learn the IDs of these specimens. All in all a great day and Herb was wonderful to collect with and very generous and knowledgeable besides. Hope we get to do this again next year. Oh, and by the way, the family visit went well too.

New project I'm working on prepping. I grabbed this plate from Penn Dixie earlier in the season, and it's just loaded with bits of all different things. I've taken it on as a long term projects to prep out this section as best as possible exposing as much as possible. I don't have an actual before photo, because I didn't think it was worth photographing until I started playing with it. I will keep updates as I go!

The Indiana State Museum has an impressive collection of Hoosier fossils, a lot of crinoids as one would expect, and it is worth your time if you are in Indianapolis. The museum is downtown and very pleasant, with other museums and restaurants nearby. I wrote a blog entry about it that includes photos: http://www.americangeode.com/blog/fossil-collection-indiana-state-museum/

This was a truly incredible hunt. Please be patient with me as this will take several replies as there are LOTS of pictures and a story to tell. I will say "The End" when I'm done. :-) This was a private hunt booked through the Eagle Bluff Environmental Learning Center, Ecotours, for three generations of the same family. They were experienced fossil hunters and it showed! I'll give you a teaser of the TWO best finds! Praecupulocrinus conjugans as IDed for crinoid expert Crinus in this post: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/66595-beautifully-articulated-ordovician-crinoid/ AND A beautiful whole trilobite from the Decorah Shale which I believe to be an Anataphrus borreaus, that is what we usually pull out of this site, but it needs more prep to be sure. Read on for the WHOLE trip report... It was a beautiful July day in southeast Minnesota for fossil hunting. Temps in the 70s, sunshine, a breeze, low humidity and we had just had two torrential rains that washed out a whole new batch of fossils. The bluff country if SE MN is part of the Driftless... http://www.bluffcountryfossils.net/blog/mysteries-of-the-driftless-video/ and considered one of the most beautiful areas in North America - and very fossiliferous! The Eagle Bluff bus arrived and we started out with about an hour tour at my place, Whispering Winds in Spring Valley, of the fossil gardens and fossil prep barn. With three children ages 5-9, I set up my dino area and showed them a young pigeon as an example of what a baby dinosaur may have looked like as all birds are descended from the dinosaurs. Thanks to the generosity of TFF members I was able to give them a REAL dinosaur bone collected in Wyoming and fossil shark and stingray teeth collected in Morocco. And they had a blast in the fossil sandbox fill with St. Peter Formation sand, fossils and minerals. Then off to Masonic Park which too me is the perfect fossil park! This limestone cliff shows the Prosser and Stewartville members of the Galena Formation wonderfully. A branch of the Root River runs below the cliff and not only Ordovician fossils but also Native American artifacts and Ice Age fossils (mammoth teeth) have been collected here. It also has a cave, an abandoned quarry, and even a hidden stream coming out from beneath a bluff with great fossil hunting on both sides of the road. Hunting the roadside ditches. From there we went to a lovely long road cut that includes both the Stewartville and Prosser members of the Galena Formation. Continued...

Here is a smattering of my finds from May 2016 up until last week! Good season already! I don't own an air eraser yet so I haven't done any detail prep work on anything yet. Small enrolled Eldredgeops

got this slab of fossilies here theres plenty of crinoid, but also some other little peices. they look to me like the front shape of a trilobite. there are no other trilobite signs on the slab other than these. am i correct in saying these are the front peices of trilobites? just asking for future finds. thanks! heres a seperate gastropod that i didnt actually take home. Still new to this whole forum thing. Working my way through highschool, and hopefully into a college or something and into paleontology. Thats the dream, anyway! idk im rambling.

I have what I think are somewhat technical questions for those more knowledgeable than myself. Wandering the wonderland that is the Wilson Clay Pits of central Texas, you tend to run across numerous examples of these fossils... The above photo shows only one side of the spines. The other side is smooth... In the University of Texas Bulletin #2132 Stratigraphy of the Pennsylvanian Formations of North-Central Texas (1921), Plummer and Moore have them identified as Hydreionocrinus sp. spines. So, for my first question, is Hydreionocrinus still a valid genus? If not, what is the new name? While I knew that they were spines, I have been confused by the placement on the animal itself. I had seen reconstructions of Delocrinus sp. with the spines radiating from the top of the cup. But these looked different. I then stumbled across a paper from the Ohio Journal of Science called TEGMEN ROOF OF PLAXOCRINUS MOORSI (WHITFIELD) by J.J. Burke. He describes very similar plate spines on the tegmen roof of the anal sac of Plaxocrinus sp. Below is the figure in his paper that caught my attention. So, I tried a quick sketch of what I thought Hydreionocrinus might look like. Am I correct in assuming the spines are located at the tip of the anal sac? I'm guessing that the textured plate surface is attached to the sac. Is there a complete Hydreionocrinus calyx that I could look at (I'm kinda visually minded...)? I'm sure the drawing is out of proportion. I was drawing from memory and imagination more than anything. It could be a crinoid chimaera... Your comments are welcome and appreciated...

Hi all- They don't call it Good Friday for nothing. The Sundance Fm is something I have wanted to explore on my own for a while and I finally got the chance to do a little exploring in this Jurassic Ocean of Wyoming last Friday. I went to a new (-ish ranch). My girlfreind and I went to this place two years ago on Easter and found dinosaurs in the Morrison Fm. Nothing worth collecting but there they were. This this time I went to explore the beds below the Morrison. The first outcrop I got to was a little outcrop of a layer that I have seen many times before... it is loaded with star shaped crinoid stem pieces... Pentacrinites. I have a bunch of these already, but I always collect a sample when I find the layer. I also know that there are rare occurences of other echinoderms in this layer. I found some sea urchin spines. Then off to the main hillside. At the base of the hillside I found the same layer exposed, but much more extensively and I started hunting for the more elusive echinoderms. And it worked... I found a crinoid head with a bit of stalk. And the remains of a starfish. As far as I know there are only two complete starfishes from this layer known from Wyoming, both in private collections. Even parts and pieces are rare. Here is the crinoid.... the calyx is at the bottom and slightly eroded; one feather arm is quite visible. Above the calyx is a piece of the stem, with cirri visible. Pentacrinites is known for its cirri... little 'branches' that come off of the 'stem'. This will never be a superb crinoid specimen like we have seen from other folk. The echinoderms from this layer do not prep well at all... you get what you get. Still this is my very first crinoid calyx. Yee haa. And the starfish is only three busted arms. Excellent finds for one day. Now I was off to upper layers... uphill in search of ichthyosaur bones. The Sundance is often littered with belemnites, and this slope was not any different. Lots of belemnites. Then I found this chunk of rock. At the very top of the Sundance is a platy sandstone layer that has nice pterosaur tracks. But these are only found south of Casper, so I was not expecting to see this at all. I was not even close to the top of the Sundance, and well north of Casper. But I am interpreting this as a lousy pterosaur footprint (Pteraichnus) and two 'hand'prints. Now, I do claim to be quite skeptical of uncertain traces such as these, but if you sompare these with nice pterosaur tracks, they are quite similar, but less defined, so an undertrace or an infilling. The second problem with this is that the handprints are going the opposite direction than the footprint... Here are some better tracks from my friend Susan B's blog. You decide. I found no others in the area. I walked up and down this hill until... bones in concretion!!! Then more... pieces of concretion on the slope with bones in them. I spent an hour collecting as many as possible and found a few that fit together. I decided they were part of an icthyosaur snout. No teeth to be found, but I am told their teeth fallout pretty easily postmortem. Here is the scene with my backpack for scale. The rock to the left of my pack has a couple of pieces of ichthy snout on it... shown in the second photo. This was a good day indeed. At home I washed the pieces of concretion and did a bit of puzzle work. Here is my cat, Misha, supervising the drying of an ichthyosaur. There is about 15 inches of snout pieces that fit together. The pieces in the foreground fit together too, but I do not know what they are. And my take of belemnites and a few clams. Good Friday was a good day after indeed. I will return to this site after a few good rains a try to find the source of this concretion. jpc

Spring is here is the Ozarks. I had some business to take care of in Rogers, Arkansas. After lunch Billie and I drove a couple of miles to a weathered Karst limestone in the Boone formation. The site is easy access on the way to Beaver Lake. The Boone formation is: Early Mississippian Period Crinoids are the most common fossil found in the Boone formation, but brachiopods, bryozoa, mollusks, corals, shark material, trilobites, conodonts, and others fossils are known. The lower contact of the Boone Formation is considered disconformable in most places, but some researchers suggest a conformable lower contact with the Chattanooga Shale; the contact with the St. Joe Member is conformable. The thickness of the Boone Formation is 300 to 350 feet in most of northern Arkansas, but as much as 390 feet has been reported

I found a nice colony of Crinoid fossils in a chunk of limestone here in central Iowa. Could someone tell me what period they are likely from?