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Hello everyone! I found myself in Vermont today, and through much cajoling I convinced my parents to allow a detour to a fossil site a forum member let me know about a year ago. It is from the Crown Point Formation, Ordovician in age. The first time time I was there, about a year ago, I collected a ton of trilobite cross sections. While those are cool, this time I wanted to focus on finding ones worn in a slightly more favorable fashion, and perhaps one worthy of prep. Unfortunately, I didn’t find any worthy of prep, but I did find some decent trilo-bits. Also came home with a Gastropod and a funny piece of pareidolia (450 million year old Mr. Bill?). I didn’t have much space in the car reserved for fossils, so I was sparing in what I picked up. ‘Twas a fun hour or so indeed.

These are 2 of the largest gastropods that I have come across while digging fossils out of these sandstone boulders. I'm not sure but I think the first one is maybe a solariella maculate. I can find photos of what looks like the second one but I can't seem to place a name to it. Location, near Palmdale, Ca., most likely from the Pliocene period.

Here are a few small bits from the Cincinnatian (Upper Ordovician) roadcut near St Leon, IN, that I’m not sure of the IDs. They were all collected from the butter shale trilobite layer of the Liberty Formation. First is what I think may be part of a crinoid? Not positive. Next, I have no idea. Maybe part of a crinoid. A fragment of a conulariid also crossed my mind. Here is a small brachiopod that I picked up thinking it was Zygospira but is definitely not. I’m guessing this trilobit is Flexicalymene, but I know a few other species of trilobites are found here so I wanted to check.

I realize that this is very weathered and would be extremely difficult (and most likely impossible) to put any sort of specific ID on, but I was wondering if anyone thought it might be a gastropod? What is left of one anyway. I picked up the rock because it has a couple of brachiopods on the other side, and only noticed this after I got it home for a closer look. It’s Ordovician from the Drakes Formation near Bardstown Kentucky. Sorry for the lack of scale, but it’s about 1 inch (2.54cm) across.

Hello everyone! I'm here once again to ask for some identification help as I continue to work on my fossil area display. Today I have a few items from Penn Dixie (Hamburg, NY, mid-Devonian) for you to look at. But before I show the photos, I was wondering about the formation that we find fossils in at Penn Dixie - is it all Moscow Formation? Okay, now on to the photos... Specimen #1: A Platyceras gastropod, but I'm not sure of the species: Specimen #2: A horn coral on the same rock as the Platyceras - is it Stereolasma rectum or Amplexiphylum hamiltoniae? Specimen #3: I've posted this one before, asking if it was a goniatite or a gastropod, but I'm starting to think it's a gastropod with some of the middle missing - perhaps Naticonema lineata or Euomphalus laxus? Specimen #4: A brachiopod and horn coral on the same rock as the goniatite/gastropod specimen - is the brachiopod Athyris spiriferoides? And is the horn coral Stereolasma rectum or Amplexiphylum hamiltoniae? Specimen #5: An unknown piece of something on the same rock as the goniatite/gastropod and the brachiopod - any ideas? Thanks in advance! Monica

I am putting together some educational displays and I am need of an example of a Cambrian age Pelecypod and Gastropod. Thank You

I went with the Delaware Valley Paleontological Society to a few spots in Central New York last month. Cole Hill Rd. in Hubbardsville has several outcrops on private land where the owners are willing to share with fossil hunters. We scrabbled up and down the scree - Whee- and found our fill of trilo-bits, including one Dipleura cephalon covered with druse calcite, plus oodles of brachiopods, nautiloids, straight-shelled cephalopods, gastropods of all different shapes, and bivalves. I learned a tough lesson that afternoon. Always wrap your specimens as you go. Not only will they keep from breaking, but they are easier to find when your bucket tips and tumbles down the hillside across countless tons of scree There were lots of pained faces around me as I hunted down the things I'd already found.. It took me half an hour to recover everything I could, but the best ones managed to make it home. Dilpeura trilobite cephalon Another trilobite cephalon, found by someone else in the group. This one is covered in sparkling calcite. Crinoid holdfast? with Ptomatis rudis gastropod unknown, probably nautiloid Cornellites fasculata bivalve Palaeozygopleura sp. misc. unknown brachiopods If anyone has any ideas, I'd like to hear them. This spine-shaped object is about 6 inches long. I'd discount it as variations in the rock color, but the left end is curved outward from the matrix. Worm trace fossil. They made carpets of these on the sea floor.

Hi all, I hope everyone's out enjoying their summer. I know I am, as Ive finished and mapped out a couple more spots to hunt with all this high water Missouri has. I found this recently at a new location, and I believe it to be from the Burlington Formation. It looks to me kind of like a Straparolus gastropod. If anyone else could help confirm or deny that, I thank you ahead of time! Found in Henry County, Missouri.

Hello, So, I've mentioned several times a rock that I found at my old house and found fossils in. Today, I can now tell you that I'm finally done looking at and going through the Rock. In total, inside the rock, I found two gastropod shells, seven bones that were most likely from a fish, and a whole lot of petrified wood. It's amazing that all this was inside a small 3 to 5 pound rock! Pictures will be coming shortly. I can't really do it from my phone, and my laptop went missing. I'm trying to find it. As soon as I get the pictures, I will post them. Jared

As usual I had the urge to go fossil hunting this weekend so I decided to take a trip to Arkona and have a relaxing day of surface collecting. It was calling for rain all week but turned out to be a nice day (aside from the brutal heat and swarming deer flies). Things were looking a little different this year. Spring hit this roadway to one of the pits pretty hard. Critters everywhere so you have to watch your step. There were loads of tiny toads that must have just grown up and left the water. Also found this poor strawberry plant struggling on top of a hill in poor soil but somehow managed to fruit And now for the fossils... I didn't have any luck finding the blastoid or crinoid I was after but I did take a few things home. Some corals Aulocystis ramosa, Platyaxum frondosum Favosites sp. A brach species I didnt have yet and a large Callipleura Nucleospira concinna, Callipleura nobilis An interesting bryozoan and a cluster of tube worms unknown bryozoan, Spirorbis sp. Gastropods Platyceras bucculentum, Naticonema lineata Possible arthropod trackway? And a new trilo species for me. Beaten up but I'll take it. The cephalon+partial thorax look like Basidechenella Pseudodechenella arkonensis. The pygidium looks like Crassiproetus crassimarginatus (top one was found last year).

It's taken me a while to post this, but my boyfriend and I took another trip to Penn Dixie on the Fourth of July! For those who have been to Penn Dixie I'm sure you know it's impossible even for a total newbie to leave empty handed. I didn't get anything super amazing like some of the full trilos th at I've seen other people post, but I did get what I went in hoping to find - gastropods!!! I THOUGHT that I found 2 - the large one and the good spiral one. But when I started washing the mud off them last night I discovered two others on the other side of some chunks that we had kept for their trilo fragments! They aren't perfect, but I'm so happy because all I've wanted to find since I started going to Penn Dixie was a snail It has a little bit to do with my love for David Attenborough shows and learning that we are currently in the Golden Age of the Snail which makes me unreasonably happy. I'll try to get some more pictures tonight of everything we found to help illustrate how many fossils you can leave Penn Dixie with - even when your boyfriend is making you be more selective and says you can't keep everything! I took a picture right after I found the third gastropod (the smaller not spirally one - I know the name is in the Penn Dixie guidebook but I can't think of it right now) Realized I jumped the gun by taking a picture of the three when I found this guy! He's definitely not as great as the other spirally one, but I might try to extract him better at some point! Not even the best trilobite pieces we found, but the only ones I have pictures of at the moment!

While working on a specimen, this little gastropod fell out. Its measures about 7mm wide. Is it a Worthenia or something else? Being so small, I'm not sure it looks like the classic examples I find on fossil plates. Ruler is in mm. Found in the Glenshaw Formation. Pennsylvanian in age.

Found this piece in the same piece of limestone that my last questionable piece was in. It's a Gastropod for sure. It was split within two separate planes of rock. There wasn't any detail within the split, so I just glued the two pieces back together. I've found lots of gastropods in limestone, but they are usually really tiny. This one was a full size for once. Glued back together using Paraloid B-72. As close as I can say, this limestone is approximately 305 million years old. I've considered both Donaldina and Meekospira. Last Questionable Piece:

I've seen a lot of opalized fossils but none exactly like this so I was wondering if anybody could help me pinpoint exactly what it is and if it holds any value? The specimen is roughly 25 mm, semi translucent and has a fair amount of color.

This year I pulled the trigger on heading to Penn Dixie for the Dig With the Experts weekend! Definitely would highly recommend . I drove up from Boston to the Buffalo area on Thursday and spent the day Friday digging with @Malcolmt and @JamesAndTheFossilPeach. It was a blast! Thanks again guys for giving me a lay of the land. Credit to @JamesAndTheFossilPeach for the find of the day with a giant Eldredgeops (pic below). Saturday and Sunday were spent looking for trilobites in the roped off Dig With the Experts section of excavated shale with some success. Monday I drove back to Boston, and stopped to stretch my legs in Glenerie, NY to walk a stretch of road looking for Devonian brachiopods and gastropods. Got a couple! All in all, a great trip... although I'm nice and sore . Here are my takeaways from the weekend. I tried to get a bit of the entire Penn Dixie Ecosystem keeping at least one of everything and as many trilobites as I could find. I wish I took more pictures Saturday and Sunday, but I was too busy splitting shale . Cheers, Barret

Good morning, this item is cross posted on Facebook. This cool rock was found in the surf at Onslow Beach in Jacksonville NC. There are Gastropods, unidentified shell and mystery circles/ovals by the hundreds if not thousands. My question is what are these little round areas? The rock is shown wet in order to bring out the features listed. Size 1.5” x 1”. The rock is smooth to touch despite seeing texture in photo. Thank you in advance!

Hey Gang, Looking for some help on what these guys are. Family and/or Genus would be great. Probably Tampa member of the Arcadia formation? Hillsborough county, Florida. Miocene? Here's unfortunately a real lousy comparative photo of the other specimen, but with a much better view of the shape of the aperature. Any help is appreciated. Thanks! Regards, Chris

Last Saturday (April 6th, 2019) my wife and I made our second trip to Tully, NY to search for trilobite fossils. Unfortunately this was the second time I was unable to find a complete trilobite; I'll keep searching for them in other locations. I did find some other fossils that I thought were interesting enough to keep. The first photo is of the hill in Tully that I searched. On our first trip I tried to cover the entire hill while we were there, on our second trip I concentrated on smaller areas and had better results with finding fossils. A gastropod fossil which is next to another fossil that is round, flat and has a spiral pattern that is difficult to see in the photo. I found many brachiopods and some bivalves. This is the longest crinoid stem that I've found so far at Tully, it is about 13/4 inches in length. I'm guessing this is another crinoid stem. It has a much larger diameter than the other crinoid stems that I've found and it has "spikes". And two very small pieces of fossil from trilobites, which I was happy to find even though they are not complete. Thanks for looking.

Hello All Today and the next five days I'm on a family trip in the Ardennes. I am close to the region around Hotton. This is known for the many invertebrate fossils that can be found here. I went to a quarry first. I had to get permission from the owners but they gave if I didn't break the obvious rules of fossilhunting in an active quarry. The weather was very nice and the fossils numerous. What else does a fossilhunter want? I searched in an the loose rocks and didn't even had to use my hammer. The ground here is littered with fossil corals. In 5 minutes I found about 20 pieces. I have no Idea of the species yet.

A few weeks ago my mother, Stella (dog), and I went to a old-reliable heteromorph site in the Atco. After I dragged all my equipment to the part of the site that I was going to work, she went walking with Stella to look at some of the check-dams full of brought in Edwards limestone, chicken wire bags full of the brought in matrix put in the ditches for sediment control. In 2017 while we were at the same Atco site she was looking at a dumped pile of the Edwards and found a rare cidarid (see thread here) that compares well with Temnocidaris (Stereocidaris) hudspethensis. The sight of seeing that bizarre looking fossil just laying on the ground was quite a shock for both of us and motivation to hunt the dams more, and since then she has been casually looking over every check-dam hoping for another one. But because this Atco site is also rich in heteromorphs, I tend to focus all my attention on the chalk and neglect the Edwards dams, in these cases to my slight ire but also amazement at what she found with Stella. She did it again on the 9th, and found another cidarid that appears to be the same species as the last one from 2017, though from a different dam. I was at my Atco pile when she came over and showed it to me, completely blowing away all my finds in a very welcome way. The brought in Edwards is early upper Albian in age (about 107.6 mybp) and is a very fossiliferous crystalline limestone jammed packed with rudists and Chondrodonta sp. as well as the occasional gastropod. It makes for quite the sensory overload when trying to look for other things amongst the fossiliferous morass. The limestone is also interspersed with somewhat softer red sandstone that infills crevices in the much harder limestone and is more quickly weathered away in older exposures. I have tried so-far unsuccessfully to isolate the quarry from which the matrix originated to ask them permission to get a chance at the fossils before they are dumped in bags and hauled tens of miles to sites, damaging them. The problem is that there are multiple quarries in the nearest counties that expose the Edwards, namely Hood and Johnson counties. I have seen this matrix at sites all over North Texas, but I don't know if all that matrix is from the same quarry as the matrix from my Atco site since the Edwards is heavily quarried for fill all over the state. For now we are left to dig though the jumbled, knocked around bagged matrix, but even so the limestone is extremely hard so the fossils are not usually completely destroyed. And the site is big with lots of busted open bags. This latest cidarid is in about the same condition as the first, that being not so great but not so bad. Both specimens are missing most of their adoral sides and their apical plates are gone, leaving their circular apical scars. But they are still quite nice and intricately detailed, and also preserve some of their big mamelon tubercles, with the first specimen preserving 2 and the latest preserving 5, though there could be more under the globs of matrix stuck to them. This latest is also bigger. The first had a diameter of 52 mm at the ambitus and a preserved height of 37 mm, while the latest is 59 mm at the ambitus and 45 mm in height, though keep in mind that since they are both missing most of their adoral sides they would have had more height in life. The apical scar on the first specimen is 19 mm in diameter and on the second is 21 mm, with the crushed calcite fragments of the apical plates seen in the cavities left behind on both. I really didn't expect her to find another specimen of this rarity again, but apparently this matrix is a honey hole brought in by the truck load, making this site two honey holes in two epochs. Then on Wednesday I went by the same check dam from which this latest cidarid came and found what really appears to be a belemnite, but that is for another topic in the ID forum. Hopefully I can post that find soon. Since new Atco exposure at the site has temporarily slowed down I have an excuse to take a good hard look at the Edwards dams tomorrow afternoon. If we find anymore from the dams I will post it to this thread, so hope to see more In the mean time, here are the pictures of the echinoids, the check dam from which this latest specimen came, and a nifty Chondrodonta sp. she found in said dam. I welcome any other finds that anyone has found in the Edwards or its equivalents and any tips on how to prep limestone as hard as crystalized concrete. Also, sorry for the picture quality. My Nikon decided to die a few months ago for some reason and I have yet to get it fixed, so if anyone knows a camera repair shop that fixes Nikons in the DFW area, I am all ears. *Pictures incoming, computer acting up*

Need help identifying this fossil. Found in Pleistocene marl deposits near the city of Rhodes (capital city of the island of Rhodes in Greece). It measures 5 cm in diameter. Unfortunately the top whorls are missing and only the last two whorls are preserved.

I wanted to share what I think is exciting news about my NY crinoid that won fossil of the month here about a year ago. "Mike I am presently in Washington, DC visiting the Springer room at the Natural History Museum. The Springer room is where they keep all the crinoids; both type and non-types. You might be happy to know that your specimen is one of the reasons for the visit :-) We discussed what species of crinoid you collected and that prompted me to review the whole group. It has been almost 100 years since Goldring wrote the Devonian Crinoids of New York (1923) and I think we know a bit more now because of specimens like yours. Crinoids that are presently classified as Gennaeocrinus can probably be divided into at least three different genera and all Devonian species presently assigned to Aorocrinus need to be reviewed as well. I have photographed all examples of type specimens at the USNM. As is often the case, this has impacted on not only the taxonomy at the genera/ species level but has implications for both higher taxonomic levels as well as relationships with Silurian and Mississippian taxa." George C. McIntosh, Ph. D. Curator, Geology Rochester Museum & Science Center

These are from the Middle Pennsylvanian (Beeman) in southern New Mexico. 60mm seam of limestone embedded with gastropods. So deeply embedded and oriented as to make identification more challenging. Guess: Bellerophon * Surface is not smooth. * Appears to be symmetrical. * Ridge along the midline. Larger hash plate. Each of the larger gastropods is approximately 25mm. This plate is 220mm x 270mm at widest measurements. Smaller hash plate View of side of larger hash plate Ridge Aperture Another ridge It's my intent to prep on these two slabs while I hide from the heat during the hot months here in the desert. At least an approximate identification would be quite helpful so I have some idea of the shapes I will be trying to reveal.