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I found this by chance on a Sunday afternoon walk on Hayling Island beach on the south coast of Hampshire near The Inn on the Beach. I wasn't even looking for fossils on the predominantly cherty beach but was watching my footing very carefully as I left the beach and stepped onto the car park when I saw the characteristic line of twin holes. I initially thought it was was a Conulus Abogalerus (Leske) because it's really conical in shape and the right size but because the mouth was not central realised it had to be something else. Now I think it's probably Echinocorys Scutatus (Leske). It's got a projection on it, just like specimen "e" on this page. I can only find one other sighting of Echinocorys Scutatus in the area, the first photo on this page which was found at Peacehaven but that's 90km (55 miles) away. This forum has a partial specimen of some kind of echinoid found on Hayling Island in 2011 but I can't find any other mention of echinoid fossils on Hayling Island on the internet so I feel very lucky to have found something which must be quite rare

I found all 20 of these in about 2 hours at just one spot! Yesterday was my lucky day! I honestly should have thrown quite a few of them back but several of them are real beauties!

Hi guys I was wondering what your thoughts on this flint echinoid were, is it too worn to be identified?

Hi guys, I have this strange echinoid from sweden,, but the provenance might be off thanks for your help

As most of you should be able to easily tell, I know virtually nothing about invertebrates, despite the good potential my area has for them. However, I was super fortunate the other day to find what ranks among my two best invertebrate finds: My first Tetragramma echinoid While looking for flint nodules to knap, my step brother encountered a tiny little oasis of shale/clay in a vast sea of limestone. He wasn't immediately interested, but still mentioned it when he was talking about how he also found some solid, climbable boulders in the same area. From the photo, I didn't have high hopes, but I still went anyway, mostly to check out the climbing potential there - though I brought some of my fossil collecting gear too. The area is mapped as Edwards Limestone, so I'm not sure what formation that little tongue of shale actually is - yet I was pleased to find that it was heavily fossiliferous, with many common invertebrates. Here's the entire exposure, shown below: the shadows make it hard to see, but there really is not much shale/clay visible under that limestone overhang anyway With some inspection, I then saw this: Isn't that a beautiful sight? While I didn't know the specifics of what I was seeing, I knew at least that it was a quality echinoid, and I was excited by its appearance. It was in solid shape and was removed easily. Only after posting a photo or two on my Instagram story did I realize that it's more than just a nifty echinoid, when @facehugger mentioned that it might be a Tetragramma! Here are some more photos of it when I got home: Here it is cleaned: Rarely does a fossil hunt of this nature end up this lucky for me - an uncommon genus in a microscopic exposure. Because of that, I thought it was worth posting about the whole trip!

As most of you should be able to easily tell, I know virtually nothing about invertebrates, despite the good potential my area has for them. However, I was super fortunate the other day to find what ranks among my two best invertebrate finds: My first Tetragramma echinoid While looking for flint nodules to knap, my step brother encountered a tiny little oasis of shale/clay in a vast sea of limestone. He wasn't immediately interested, but still mentioned it when he was talking about how he also found some solid, climbable boulders in the same area. From the photo, I didn't have high hopes, but I still went anyway, mostly to check out the climbing potential there - though I brought some of my fossil collecting gear too. The area is mapped as Edwards Limestone, so I'm not sure what formation that little tongue of shale actually is - yet I was pleased to find that it was heavily fossiliferous, with many common invertebrates. Here's the entire exposure, shown below: the shadows make it hard to see, but there really is not much shale/clay visible under that limestone overhang anyway With some inspection, I then saw this: Isn't that a beautiful sight? While I didn't know the specifics of what I was seeing, I knew at least that it was a quality echinoid, and I was excited by its appearance. It was in solid shape and was removed easily. Only after posting a photo or two on my Instagram story did I realize that it's more than just a nifty echinoid, when @facehugger mentioned that it might be a Tetragramma! Here are some more photos of it when I got home: Rarely does a fossil hunt of this nature end up this lucky for me - an uncommon genus in a microscopic exposure. Because of that, I thought it was worth posting about the whole trip!

Hi guys what are your thoughts on this echinoid from beachy head? Thanks

I got the chance to go to the Oxford Clay twice over the last few days. I'm always looking for echinoderms at this site, and I prefer this one in winter when the vegetation has died back and I can spot lots of small, delicate detail. These are some if my favourite finds from the last few days.

I'm trying to determine if these are echinoid. I found these two on an Oxford Clay trip yesterday, Jurassic, Callovian, Peterborough Member, near Yaxley in Cambridgeshire. The first is, I think, a partial echinoid spine. My only doubts are because it's quite different from the others I've found at the site, it's a very different pattern. I would appreciate another opinion. The second has completely confused me. It looks black, so I thought it was pyrite, but when I photographed it, it's clearly a completely different material. It's a very odd shape, like a tiny snowman, and the only thing I thought it might be is a mamelon from an echinoid tubercle. I don't have anything else like this, and the different material puzzles me. I would really appreciate opinions on this.

This fossil was found in Malta's southeastern coast. I found a pretty nice maltese website: https://continentalshelf.gov.mt/en/Pages/Geological-Map-of-the-Maltese-Islands.aspx According to which the fossil was found in "upper globulina limestone (miocene , burdigalian to early langhian)": Limestone ID The ruler is in centimeters. Any ideas on what exact type of echinoid could this be? Thank you so much!

Another Moroccan fossil. I don't actually doubt this is a real fossil; but I would like to verify the identification. It's labeled as a Phymosama raguini from the Atlas Mountains, and the age as Upper Cretaceous "Camanian" (I assume they meant Campanian). Apologies again for photo quality; my equipment budget is quite limited. Also, and this is a more general request: When any expert here looks at photos and says "Oh, that's a Murgatroidus" I would really appreciated a word or two explaining how they know. I've read a fair number of "Diagnosis" sections in scientific papers, and it would be hard to find examples of scientific writing so jargon-laden. (I do understand that there are excellent reasons for that.) As I'm very new at this, I'd love to improve my identification skills. What I know looking at this is that it has the shape of an echinoid (a slightly flattened sphere), that it looks like there are spine bases, and there are also ambulacrial grooves (the bands of little pores) showing fivefold symmetry. So undoubtedly an echinoderm, and likely some kind of sea urchin relative, but I'd like to push my identification skills a little beyond that. Thanks.

Any ideas what this is? Found in Maryland. Has kind of a hex pattern on one side.

Over the winter holidays I took advantage of the time I had off from work to go on a nine-day fossil collecting road trip through Mississippi and Alabama. Last week, while collecting at an exposure of the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) Prairie Bluff Chalk in Alabama, I stumbled upon a fragment of a cidarid echinoid with six associated plates. After some research that night from my hotel room did not provide an identification, I sent an email to George Phillips, the paleontology curator at the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science, asking for help. What I initially thought was just a cool find turned out to be one much more significant. In his email response, George told me that associated cidaroid plates are quite rare and that in the museum's entire collection, they have only two examples of plates attached as pairs. He said that until then he had never seen one more complete than the one I had found. He further explained that the common Maastrichtian cidaroid of the Gulf Coastal Plain had only been known from isolated plates and spines as either of two genuses and that he strongly believed that this specimen could be enough to finally identify the cidaroid to genus level. Given the importance of the find, I was happy to donate the specimen to George and the Mississippi Museum of Natural Science for further study and publication in a future paper on Maastrichtian echinoids of the Gulf Coastal Plain.

Alright folks, just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of our fateful trip... but if your in a TLDR mood.... Fossils get real heavy, real fast, and we found a lot. I had a rare full weekend off work, so my son and I went back to hunt the lake Texoma shoreline for a 2 day exploration. We started off in the same beach we found last time (that I dubbed "Echinoid Beach"), but construction had changed everything and made it much harder to hunt. The worst part is that last time we left a small pile when moving everything back to the truck. I knew where it was, but when we arrived, I realized that its buried and probably gone forever. But we made the best of it and hunted what we could. We wound up finding a lot more echinoids and one huge partial mortoniceras ammonite, plus it has echinoids in the matrix with it, so I couldnt hack that off in the field to save weight (it was HEAVY). Oh, that little one on the bottom left... I have hopes its a nautilus! Will have to prep it out to see what all is there. We had originally planned to camp out overnight, but a strong north front had pushed in overnight before, so it was 20 mph winds and lows in the 20s. So, instead we went into the town of Durant and got a hotel room. The next morning the temps were again in the 20s, frost covering the truck, but at least the winds were mild (but not absent) so we decided to check out "ammonite beach" close to the spillway. I have seen a lot of reports and pics from there, so I had an idea of the details, but this was our first trip there. Let me just say.... be careful what you wish for! I had seen pics of giant ammonites. I wanted to find a giant, complete ammonite. I wasnt mentally prepared to recover a giant, complete ammonite! We started out hunt right at the boat ramp, following the shoreline all the way around. Actually found several small partials right away, so I had high hopes. We continued on. Lots of large gryphaea in areas, and isolated areas with lot of ammonite molds and partials, so we spent a lot of time examining everything, but not finding much beyond the oysters. Finally, (I think it was over an hour later) we got to the holy shrine of the ammonite. The sights were just as the legends fortold. Ammos everywhere! Molds and partials every step you took. Some of the partials were massive as well. We looked carefully, hoping for something missed by the throngs of previous searchers, with little luck. Mr. George and his sister had passed us waaaaay back towards the start, and they were ahead in the next cove, and working on something too. They obviously knew more than us, so me made out way that direction. We did find a couple of very nice partials (halves) from the cliffside as we went, so we stashed those and moved one. Then we got to the blocks. That is where George was hammering away to chisel a monster free of the rock. Wonderful fellow, and it turns out I follow him on Youtube (North Texas Fossil Dude). He showed us what and where and how, and we moved down the beach hunting for our own monster, and we found one. Buried in stone, only the top showing. Was it complete? Could we get it out? was it excessively buried under the big caprock above? We decided to give it a go. We hammered, and hammered, and hammered on the chisels. Our arms ached but we were making progress. We kept working until finally we could see a separation develop under the bottom edge. Carefully we pried and lifted and it came free! YAY!!!! We had out ammonite! But now we had to get it back to the truck. It a LOOOOONG walk with 75??? pounds of fossils each (I had all the partials and my son had the big boy) plus hammers, chisels, picks, camera, etc. My rough measurement looks like about 1-1/2 miles long the shoreline. It felt like about 3. George and his sister were kind enough to leave us a 3rd ammonite and a half dozen tiny echinoids they recovered from their spot. The ammo wasnt tiny either! It measures 11 1/2" across! We had originally planned to go creek scouting for our next trip, but we were absolutely spent getting everything back. I helped the local economy by having a great lunch in Dennison at burger shack a block off the highway called "Best Burger Barn". If you go, get the pretzel and cheese appetizer. Seriously the best pretzel I have every had.

Fossil Friday! Today's FF video post is from Lake Texoma. We made our first ever trip to lake Texoma to search the duck creek formation for ammonites. After much research and planning, we arrived to find we could not access the locations we wanted, so we ended up scouting around. It turned out well and we found some great fossils including ammonites, oysters, clams and echinoids.

Yesterday, my son and I finally made a day-trip to Lake Texoma for some fossil hunting. We've been wanting to make this trip for while, but it can be difficult between both our jobs and weather, and lake levels. I planned for this trip by searching the google maps for good looking locations with a nearby shore access. Unfortunately, one spot turned into a private drive, and the other was closed off by the Corps of Engineers for some unknown reason. We didnt want to hit the same spot that everyone else goes to so we began just driving and looking. The first place we stopped was a gravel bar in creek. When I drove over the bridge and saw the bar, I immediately made a u-turn. I'm sure that this has been searched, but it didnt disappoint. There were a lot of Gryphaea in the marl walls as well as gravel. We found a couple large segments of ammonites and eventually found a small, complete ammonite, about 2 inches in diameter. Then we drove around the lake roads until we found a likely looking shoreline, which fortunately was only a short walk to the exposure. Hunting started slow, and we could see a couple piles of rejects left by other hunters. But we stayed optimistic and kept searching in depth, and then the finds started to show up. There were huge Gryphaea everywhere, many were 1-1/2" long. I eventually got tired of picking them up. There were huge oysters, but they were mostly broken. I did find a smaller one, about 4 inches across. Then there were many partial ammonites and finally several complete ones. Our favorite finds were the echinoids! I found the first one, and then my son found 3 more, all close together. Some of the ammonites are still imbedded in matrix, and I'm hopeful they will prep out cleanly. One of the small partials I have started trying to prep is having problems. Some of it come out clean, but some spot dont seem to have any separation plane between matrix and fossil (which is a steinkern anyway).

I’m not sure if this is allowed as a one off post, but I’ve been trying to identify this Echinoid I found in Turks and Caicos and I can’t find a species name and I was wondering if anyone knew it, thanks it’s a beast

Found this a few days ago in a local creek that has Woodbine. When I picked this up it had an "echinoid sheen" to it. Also thought it was just a possible bi valve. Not so sure after looking at Turtle egg fossil or rather possible turtle egg fossils on Google.