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Hello everyone, Does anyone know those places in Oxfordshire where I can hunt/collect fossils legally? I've heard Faringdon is fairly good for fossils. But in which part? And is it a public site for fossils collecting? Thank you very much in advance!

I am sure many of you are buyers as well as collectors, and one issue we would hate to face would be to have your legal fossils impounded by the customs, whether it be during delivery from overseas, or when you travel aboard with fossils. Personally, I've faced this situation twice. The first was when I imported a meg tooth from North Carolina. I was summoned to the customs office for smuggling in shark products. Thankfully, I managed to convince them that the megalodon was in fact extinct and not heavily endangered(glad the officer wasn't a living-meg conspiracist). Two years later, I had a Judith River theropod tooth seized mid-delivery, and I had to go to the customs again. This time, I had the misfortune of facing a paranoid officer who was determined that dinosaur fossils did not belong in personal collections. I did not have official papers with me declaring that the fossil was legal, and the officer grilled me for an hour on why I was smuggling precious dinosaur fossils. I challenged him to prove my Judith River fossil was illegal. He couldn't. Finally, after his higher-up was involved, they admitted my dinosaur tooth wasn't illegal after all, and I was allowed to keep it. It isn't always a happy ending however. My friend who was travelling overseas had bought common fossils like a Moroccan mosasaur jaw and some ammonites. In Paris, they seized his fossils, saying they had to check for the legality of the specimens. As he was in mid-travel, he had no choice but to leave his fossils behind. He never saw his fossils again, not even after negotiating with them for months. All this because he couldn't produce legal papers. Buyers and diggers would understand - most of the time you wouldn't be getting documentation from museums for your fossils... unless they are important specimens, in which case you shouldn't be trading them at all. But if you lack the papers, the customs can seize your fossil at any time if you can't prove it is legal. Do you see the logical fallacy here? Imagine say, you dug up your own tyrannosaur tooth in USA, stopped by Canada for a holiday, only to have the customs seize your fossil because you are unable to proof it isn't found in Canada. How would you feel? So to everyone who buys fossils, or bring them across countries, how would you ensure that your legal fossils can get through the customs?