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Being from Washington State, almost all of our fossils are Cenozic. The oldest fossils I've ever personally collected from here are Oligocene, and the oldest fossils I've collected overall are Eocene (Green River Formation)! My dad and I took a a couple days to camp on Vancouver Island, and I couldn't resist going to the Trent River to finally break that KT boundary. Here it is! The first Mesozoic fossil I've ever personally collected. A couple of small Mytiloides clams. These were abundant at an outcrop halfway to the falls. During our first trip to the river, I nabbed a concretion. The next morning at our camp I gave it a wack with the ball-peen hammer. At first I thought it was a coprolite, but I'm pretty sure that this is a crab carapace. Note that there's a ridge right down the middle, and it's largely symmetrical on both sides. I had to do a bit of work with the Dremel to expose more of the left side, but nicked it quite a few times. My solution was just to douse it in Paraloid to make the damage less noticeable. If you think it looks excessively shiny now, you should have seen it before I wiped it off with acetone. I did some research on crabs from the Haslam formation and Eucorystes platys seems to be a good match, it has that ridge down the middle.

Hi everyone, This little guy comes from Carniol, France. It is from the "Gargasian", Aptian, Cretaceous. Surprisingly, unlike most other finds (so everything except for belemnites), this one doesn't seem pyritized... Anyways. It's pretty flat (because of geological processes flattening it; my gut feeling says that naturally it is meant to be much rounder). Now I'm really not sure if this is a weird heteromorph ammonite or a weird gastropod. I would guess that it is a gastropod simply because they are much more common, but it just looks so weird that I'm stumped. Hopefully you guys can solve my little mystery! If better pictures are needed, which will probably be the case, I will make them. Thanks in advance, Max