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I'm very belated with this report, but it took until today to finish all the prep work on the pieces I picked up on this trip. This time was fun and quite productive, I went out with my brother and 2 of our friends. None of them are of the fossil hunting persuasion, but they enjoyed it nonetheless. This Liracassis apta was a great opportunity to test out the chisel attachment on my new air scribe.

A few odds and ends I picked up on Sunday from Twin Beach, Washington. The Burke Museum Paleontology Database is still down (PLEASE BURKE, GET IT BACK ONLINE!!!), so I can't really ID the snails right now, but one of them is clearly a moon snail, and if I had to hazard a guess, the big one is maybe some sort of spindle snail? Prepping it was very easy and zen. And of course a Callianopsis clallamensis ghost shrimp that the beach is so well known for. Till' next time!

Collected from concretions on Murdock beach Eocene

Hello all, With the start of this month I have gotten back to doing some fossil prep. I am still very much learning but I am happy with how this one turned out. It's a Callianopsis clalamenis nodule from the Pysht formation of Washington State which I found this past January that preserves two sets of feeding and defensive claws as well as some disarticulated shell material. This prep was fun and I am excited to try another shrimp, they are a welcome break from working with very hard pyrite nodules from Yorkshire. Before prep: After about half an hour with the scribe, the first two claws are showing: After about an hour and a half: Finished. . . for now, until I smooth the matrix: I hope you enjoyed, Benton

Prepped another ghost shrimp claw from Twin Beach last night. I think it turned out pretty well. Unfortunately, the glue I used to reattach some of the little bits of exoskeleton left a bit of residue which you can see in the picture, but I don't think it detracts from the piece all that much.

I'm fairly new to fossil preparation. After a trip to the Olympic Peninsula back in November, I had a ton of concretions and no way to see what was inside. At first a tried splitting them with a hammer, but after busting a perfectly good claw into a million pieces, it was clear that I needed some actual preparatory equipment, either an air scribe or a Dremel 290. I went with the 290, and for the last month I've been working through the concretions. Most of them are duds, either empty or just a small piece of exoskeleton at the center. I unearthed a pretty solid looking defensive claw a few weeks ago, and today I finally had another success: a feeder claw! I've inflicted a pretty good number of dings on both claws, but overall I'm happy with them. My most common mistake is flaking the very tips off. Once the surrounding shale is chipped away, they tend to detach very easily. When this happens, they're usually still in a tiny chunk of shale, which I find near impossible to disassociate from the tip. At that point, getting the tips reattached has usually proven to be a lost cause. The species is Callianopsis clallamensis from the late Oligocene of Twin Beach Washington. Defensive claw. Feeder claw. Both claws mounted.

Hi everybody, Boy, it's been a while since I made a post, but then it's been a while since I did any kind of fossil hunting. A friend of mine who I met while volunteering for a nature center invited me out on a camping trip to the Olympic Peninsula. He claimed to know a couple beaches where the concretion game is really good, and he sure wasn't wrong! The weather was mostly terrible; bitter cold and heavy rain punctuated by occasional blue sky, but when you love beachcombing as much as we do, you forget about it! This is the Pysht Formation at Twin Beach. Lots of concretions were eroded out of it, especially because of the recent storms. Before long we had filled multiple bags up with them. Callianassa ghost shrimp claws are what we were after, and we found one already naturally split open on the beach. My portion of the haul. The ones on the bottom side of the box have that oblong shape that is a good indicator of having claws inside. I did split a round one open with a chisel and hammer only to break a perfectly good claw into a million tiny pieces. My friend is a wiz with the air scribe, so at some point in the near future we're going to spend an afternoon in his garage exposing some of them that way. Those 3 on the bottom I will definitely be saving for his air scribe. I've never used one before, so I'm excited to give it a try. There were some nice fossilized clams littered around the beach. I think these are Lucina. Petrified wood with some Teredo bores. There were some awesome non-fossil finds to be had as well. Lots of small, shiny quartz pieces that I find good for fidgeting with during some of my more boring classes. I was stoked to find this absolutely massive giant acorn barnacle (Balanus nubilus). Apparently it's the biggest species in the entire world. Who knew!