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Hey guys, So i was bored recently and decided to put together a quick taxonomy 'checklist' of all the fossil groups and their ages that i have personally collected. This simple idea quickly spiralled out of control and after a couple hours i had put together a comprehensive spreadsheet showing all the major groups of organism that i have collected fossils from, broken down by the geological period or epoch that they originate from. The goal was to see visually how much of the fossil record i had actually sampled with my collecting and also see which 'gaps' i had yet to fill in! Turns out there is quite a lot!! I found it a fun little exercise and thought i would share it with you guys as perhaps some of you might want to do something similar with your own fossil collections. I restricted mine to fossils i had found myself rather than bought. The fields that are filled in with 'N/A' means that the particular group of organism was not present at that time in history so these don't really count towards the total area that can be collected (though some of my choices for when particular groups appear/disappear could be debated i'm sure). I have also tried to be as all-encompassing as possible by listing just about every major group of organism, but i'm sure some minor ones are left out and you may choose to modify my group names or add/remove some to suit your liking. Overall though i think it's a pretty decent coverage of the Phanerozoic fossil record. Here is a link to the blank spreadsheet that i have put up on google docs, which you can download and then fill in yourself if you wish: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/172Q5Mg1xax7jroRYoBm_jVXgJPiRx-KxbsOCWFkuuaE/edit?usp=sharing As an example to show you what it looks like once filled in i have posted mine below (both a zoomed out picture of almost the whole thing and a closer one of part of the sheet that is more readable). Click on either image and view it full size to read it better if needed. Maybe someday i'll get to fill 'collected' in the whole thing?! If anyone else does do this feel free to screenshot it and post the image in this thread, i'm curious how much others have managed to collect! Cheers, Nathan