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While my wife Tammy and I were down in Australia celebrating our anniversary (we honeymooned down under way too long ago), we looked around to see if there was a quick place we could indulge our passion for fossil hunting while we were there. I found a lot of great information on TFF (valuable resource that it is). In addition to many fine offers to be shown the fossil goodness around the Queensland area and excellent suggestions from Dave (@sandgroper) on what to see on the western coast of Australia, I was able to plan a short fossil excursion in the Melbourne area. I had searched TFF before the trip to see if anybody had posted information on trips that were fairly quick and easy without needing to setup permission ahead of time or trudge through the countryside looking for the exact locality. What I found was a posting by @Paleoworld-101 detailing a trip he made back in January which included a stop at the Beaumaris Cliffs near Melbourne: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/61248-fossil-hunting-holiday-in-victoria-australia-dec-2015-jan-2016/&do=findComment&comment=653003 While the less commonly found items such as cetacean bones or shark teeth would be fun, what intrigued me was that a particular species of irregular (heart) urchin called Lovenia woodsii seemed to be there in some abundance. This is just what I was looking for--a target on which to focus my hunting in the limited time I'd have there and something that would display nicely. Another forum member, Tom (@Seve78) was incredibly helpful in providing us some detailed information on where to hunt at the site (and sending us tide tables for the dates we'd likely be able to be there). I was also able to contact Dr. David Holloway, Senior Curator, Invertebrate Palaeontology, Museum Victoria ahead of time and inquire about legally taking my finds out of the country. Australia (rightly so) has put in place the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986 which requires that objects such as antiques, artifacts, fossils, meteorites and other objects of cultural significance be verified to be adequately represented in public collections in Australia before they are allowed to be exported. The fact that Lovenia echinoids are very common at the site made me certain that there would be no issues exporting them but making contact before collecting allowed me to receive a letter of authorization shortly after collecting at Beaumaris. A little planning saves a lot of effort in the long run. So with all my preparations made we flew off to Australia for our extended (and busy) tour of southern and western Australia. The day we flew back into Melbourne we picked up a rental car at the airport and set the GPS for our destination in Beaumaris. Having spent the previous week in relatively sparsely-populated Tasmania, the traffic around Melbourne was hard to get used to (especially driving on the opposite side of the road ). In time, we finally made it to the site by the Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron. I always think of jet fighters when I hear the word 'squadron' so a 'yacht squadron' always make me grin with silly images in my head. We parked the car in an appropriate location on one of the residential streets and followed the instructions to the site. When we arrived the tide was out but was slowly returning. Having access to the further reaches of the site is only possible during low tide (unless you want to get wet from the knees down). We spent a few minutes at the first beach area and then proceeded to further down the beach. Here are some photos for those not familiar with the site. The area just past the section roped off with orange netting becomes unpassable at higher tide. You can't walk further up the shore and the water comes to the base of this area so you'll get wet if you attempt crossing at anything but low tide. The cliffs are composed of a bright yellow sandstone material (Beaumaris Sandstone) but did not appear to show much in the way of fossil material. I was told that the best place to hunt was in the 'shingle' or broken rocky area at the base of the cliffs. Even if the cliffs were better hunting (and they're not) there are usually laws about digging into cliffs and causing erosion so I never do that anyway. Here is the first part of the beach (accessible at any tide and likely hunted more thoroughly due to that fact). We didn't spend much time there and moved on further. The second beach was where we started to find Lovenia. We just started looking in the rock rubble (shingle) till we got the search image. This is what that beach looked like: The beach was well full of enough rock to search through for some time: We ignored the sandstone cliffs and instead hunted in the gravely area near their base (and all along the beach):