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From my collection of St Clair plant material - any ideas? Less than half a centimeter thick, about two inches long.
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It’s a Crinoid column, that’s for sure. Unfortunately I found these in road gravel limestone. It’s not local, I’ve never seen one with the star shape until today. I just happened to see each one while walking today. Top left is 13mm. Bottom right is 16mm. There are 4 stacked, each about 2mm thick. I can get much closer if that helps.
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I'm new to all this, and was wondering if you folks can help me. I noticed this lying in a small creek bed in Berks County, PA. Didn't find anything else like it. Is it a fossil of some kind, or just a rock? Thanks!
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Mystery Carboniferous Plant - just another fern or something else?
cameronsfossilcollection posted a topic in Fossil ID
Found this in some Pennsylvanian aged shale in Ambridge, PA at the well known mahoning exposure. It doesn’t have visible pinnae like the ferns I’ve found in the area, but it could just be a strange preservation. Any ideas - is this just a fern? Thanks!- 4 replies
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Hi all, Here’s an interesting plant find. I discovered it in a locality in Western PA known for producing good plant fossils. I’m thinking seed fern, maybe related to Alethopteris somehow but to be honest I’m not sure what the species is. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance Stratigraphy: Connelsville Sandstone of the Casselman Formation of the Conemaugh Group. Age-Late Pennsylvanian, ~305 MYA
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Hi! Please excuse us if we aren’t following decorum with our photo sizes, staging, etc. Since the quarantine has us unexpectedly homeschooling, we took our 5th grader to collect some fossils and though I’m sure they are pretty basic, I’m having a hard time helping her ID all of them. Any info is appreciated, as we are absolute beginners. ☺️ These were collected at a random roadcut in northern PA, another in West Virginia, and also at Beltsville Lake (where we searched all day for a trilobite until I realized I probably don’t even know what the fragments would look like).
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Good morning all!- hope you are all healthy! I found these foraminifera (my first!!!) on April 20, but took my time fishing them out of some limestone, then meticulously cleaning and prepping them. Thanks to Clear Lake for suggesting, in my first post that it looks similar to Ozawainella ciscoensis-really appreciate it! They were all found in winterset limestone in Kansas City. Researching numerous references, I found it is far more complicated identifying them, so I'll send them to someone with more expertise in i.d.s! , and am leaving them as simply Foraminifera. I i.d. them under a dissecting scope, then used 30 gauge needles to loosen them with applications of vinegar, then washed them in alternating vinegar and water, then placed them on blue clay to make them stick in place. The best one has 4 views. Just received my digital microscope and love it!! So simple and easy to use! My previous post stated it measured 458um or so, but I used the wrong objective- all of these are 860-900um in diameter. I went ahead and placed them on the fossil of the month, only because I haven't seen a lot of images on them in the forum (though I'm still looking through ).Thoughts and suggestions appreciated, and thanks for making me feel like a kid again! Hope you enjoy!- The beauty of some things simply cannot be appreciated unless you look closely!!!! Bone
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Hello everyone, I have recently received these three pieces of Pennsylvanian Flora from Pennsylvania along with some fossils of stigmaria. I have no idea what they may be from and any help is appreciated. The patterns on the first two may be recognizable to someone but I do not have hopes of finding an ID for the last one, I will leave it here just in case. All of the pieces are about 7 cm in length.
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I live in jersey near Philadelphia and I was hoping to find eurypterid fossils but the only stop I can find is Lang’s quarry which is over 5 hours away and cost a ton to hunt. I am wonder if anyone has found evidence of eurypterids in Pennsylvania , Maryland, or southern New York. If you have any pictures I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks, Noel.
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Hello all! I am a new member, and this is my first post. Could I please have some help figuring out if these rocks are petrified wood? Most of them were found in a small Pennsylvanian stream. It looks like they are quartz, crystal quartz, but I am no expert. There should be about two pictures of each rock. Thanks for your help, and I have more pictures of different rocks if needed.
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I have some beautiful crinoid stem cross-section impressions from the Devonian Mahantango in PA (runs from NY to VA) and have been searching all morning to find a good reference book that won't cost me $100 just to open the cover and see if it's adequate to the task at hand. Winifred Goldring seems to have done the definitive works, but she didn't include any cross sections! Can anybody point me in the right direction?
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- devonian
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Yesterday I traveled to vintage pa in the hopes of finding Cambrian fossils or more specifically Anomalocaris fossils which had been found in a former quarry nearby and in the same formation I was hunting. I went to an outcropping of the kinzers formation that I saw on the Wikipedia Image that I have attached, but after an hour of splitting rocks I didn’t find anything recognizable. I was hoping someone knew if I was doing something wrong or if it was just not a good spot? thanks, Noel
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Hi all! I pulled this fossil out of Red Hill, a Devonian site in central Pennsylvania. I thought it looks like it could possibly be part of a placoderm but I’d love to get some help with further identification. Thanks in advance!
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I found these at an Oriskany Sandstone exposure in Blair County Pennsylvania that is normally overgrown. There was abundant crinoid & shell material around. There is no internal structure, and the larger specimen seems to show some faint longitudinal striations. ID suggestions appreciated ad. I was thinking Mud tube, filled burrow, cephalopod /shell cast, or plant bits. I couldn't find any similar pictures in my resources.
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Hello all! We are planning a trip (with a stop in Pennsylvania) to New York this May to hunt for Trilobites and could use lots of advice. We live in North Carolina, so it is a bit of a haul and we are new to trilobite hunting and to rock splitting fossil hunting generally. I'll lay out the tentative itinerary first and then ask a few specific questions. Any recommendations on the itinerary (additions or places to skip on a limited trip) are, of course, more than welcome! Tuesday Day 0: Drive to Danville, PA and check into a hotel Wednesday Day 1: Visit the Montour Preserve fossil pit ; drive to Buffalo, NY Thursday Day 2: Visit 18 Mile Creek Friday. Day 3: Visit Penn Dixie Quarry (1) Saturday Day 4: Visit Penn Dixie Quarry (2) Sunday Day 5: Drive back to NC The big questions we have (apart from whether this itinerary seems like a good first trip for ambitious new trilobite hunters) are: What tools should we bring? I know safety glasses, chisel and geologic hammer, but what about larger picks, prybars, hammers, shovels, gloves, etc? I've read about people "digging out" an area at Penn Dixie; what is required for that? And what is involved? Is there any rhyme or reason to the pieces you choose to split? What do you look for in a spot? Is there anywhere else "nearby" (within a few hours of anywhere on the route) that we should check out? What am I forgetting to ask? Thank you so much in advance for your help! This forum has been a great planning resource for me and I find more great threads to lurk on every day! Philip
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Hi all, I’ve posted a few topics on the forum but have yet to show my entire collection, or my best finds. So here goes. A little background on me. I’ve been fossil hunting since I was very young, probably since I was 4 when I found a plant fossil in my backyard. Over the past few years as I have ventured into adulthood I have gotten very interested in the fossils of the Pittsburgh area. I will display my best finds here and periodically update the thread with new finds. As a note, many of the vertebrate fossils I have found are rare and may be important to science. I have been in contact with @jdp about this and will most likely be donating the most important ones to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. If any of my IDs seem strange or wrong please let me know, I am always learning and value new info. I guess I’ll start with the marine invertebrates. To start out we can start small, with brachiopods, cephalopods and horn corals. The first is a Linoproductus from the Ames Limestone, a classic Pittsburgh marine zone.
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About two weeks ago, we went to Beltzville State Park in Pennsylvania and found some great Devonian fossils, some of which have been identified with your help. On our way, though, we stopped at a Shell station for air in our tires. There was a small hill of dark grey colored rock (shale?) next to the air pump. My son and I had a quick look. We found what looks like a mussel (pictured here) and something else. I was wondering if it might be a trilobite. Any help is appreciated. I included the location and pic of the hill to help with identification. So, pictures appear like this: location, suspected mussel?, rock for example and then the fossil in question. The picture with the ruler shows the object (circled in succeeding photos). Sorry if this is confusing. Thanks. Lehighton, PA 18235
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Found this piece of sandstone in Sullivan Co., PA. It comes from either the Huntley Mtn. Fm. (Mississippian/Devonian) or the Burgoon Ss. (Mississippian). What could have made these concentric rings? They go through the rock perpendicular to bedding. It's odd that the center is mostly round but further out is more square. Could it be a tree fossil? That is the only thing I can think of.
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Conditions in Western PA have been unusually warm recently, with highs in the 40s and 50s. I decided to take advantage of this warm spell by getting a little bit of fossil hunting in. I decided to do a hunt focused on plants as I’ve been hunting for vertebrates for the better part of the last year and a half and, although I could never get tired of vertebrates I thought some variety was well overdue. So I headed to one of my favorite plant localities in the area. It is located in the Connellsville Sandstone of the Casselman Formation, which is in turn the upper half of the Conemaugh Group. The sandstone is around 305 million years old. The Casselman Formation holds the record of the tail end of one of the largest plant extinctions in our earths history. The prolonged wetness that had existed for much of the Pennsylvanian gave way to dryer conditions, and, as a result, the lycopsid forests fragmented. Many of these lycopsids went extinct during this event, which is known as the Carboniferous Rainforest Collapse. Conifers took advantage of these newly opened ecological niches. Their fossils have been found in this area, although I have never personally found them. Anyway, on to the fossils. Today I mostly found partial Pecopteris fronds, Neuropteris pinnules and Annularia leaflets. I’m going to include some of my better finds from other trips as well, as this trip was rather unproductive. Pictured below is the best Annularia I found today. Or Asterophyllites. I’m not sure. We’ll just go with Calamites leaves for now.
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I have been able to identify (with your help) a few of the fossils we found while hunting at Beltzville state park. This is something that may be something. I tried to get the six-sided pics as recommended. What might this be (if anything)? Beltzville State Park in Pennsylvania, USA. I believe these come the Upper Devonian Mahantango Formation. Thank you.
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From other examples I have seen, I think these are bryozoans (sp?). Is that correct? The first example in question is the one exhibiting pencil-like structure in the center of the rock. In the second picture (of the same specimen), there seems to be a porous structure shown. The shadows may look like the mold is raised from the rock, but it is not. The fossil is an imprint (concave into the matrix). I think these are from the Upper Devonian Mahantango Formation. Thanks
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This was my first time at Beltzville State Park in Pennsylvania, USA. I believe these come the Upper Devonian Mahantango Formation. I saw similar examples in other posts as was hoping to confirm my guesses. Thanks 1. Horn coral? 2. Crinoid stem?- not sure if that’s something to the left of the stem. 3. Rugose coral?
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My son (9 years old) and I are hoping to find a spot to look for fossils. We have only been hunting a few times before in California. We’re on vacation in Pennsylvania, in East Stroudsburg (1.5 hours - or so- East of New York City). We came to ski but I have been reading that this area could be good for fossils. Any tips on sites or features? I really don’t know anything about the area. Personally, I’d rather pull over in the side of the road or hike somewhere than go to a pay-to-dig site. Thanks for any advice you may have.
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As fall has finished dropping leaves and caused Poison Ivy and most insects to go dormant, I have been exploring some prospects in the Paleozoic of Central Pennsylvania. On one trip back to help my folks get a Christmas tree, I had time to spend and hour or so at an abandoned quarry that exposed Ordovician aged rock. Unlike the exposures of Ordovician rock in the Cincinnati/Louisville region of the US, or southern Ontario, or the Minnesota/Iowa area, Central PA is not know for heaps of fossiliferous limestone or shale. One has to do a little research to find what formations have fossils, and then try and find an exposure that you can prospect. I found one such quarry from an old guidebook out in Cumberland County, PA. It has exposures of the Chambersburg formation which is known to have fossils and is also known to have a bed of rock that contains an unusual Echinoderm called "Nidulites". My goal was to verify if fossils were present at the site and then try to locate the "Nidulites" bed. View of the quarry wall. The rock was tilted NE in one direction (away from the camera) and N in another direction (to the left of the photo). I started at the south end of the quarry (right side of pic above) and started to look through the fallen scree and exposed rock layers. Not finding anything I moved north along the walls of the pit until I started to find some hints of fossils in the rocks. Mostly cross sections in massive limestone, but at least there were fossils there. This is what it looked like along the walls and in the talus along their base. There were multiple pieces of limestone with Calcite crystals, both massive and crystalline, in some areas as the veins filled in cracks within the rock ages ago . I found one piece that had a couple of small Fluorite cubes on it, a rare find in the field! I finally started to find some fossils in the talus concentrated in one area but could not figure out the layer they came from. Preservation was ok but as they came from fractured massive rock, completeness was not the best. Here are my finds: Leptanea sp. Brachiopod Sowerbyella sp. Brachiopod Possibly part of an Isolteus sp. genal spine Unknowns So not too bad for a couple of hours of looking. I'll have to visit the quarry again in the future and see if I can find more in the talus and maybe trace the bed that the better fossils come from. No "Nidulites" either, but I am not discouraged. I confirmed that fossils can be found here, I just need to do some more looking.
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