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Ahoi, I have been lucky to find some real fossils out in nature today! That is not as often the case for me as for some of you lucky rockhounds, I often have to resort to hunting online or building replicas. But this time I went out and found something. There is a famous devonian reef preserved in grauwacke some 50 kilometers from where I live. the Quarry itself is protected, but there are some piles of overburden rock in the vicinity. Here is a sample of what I found: To the right (1) I think is a badly preserved solitary rugose "horn"coral. To the left (5) a "ball" of favosites? The closest match I find for the big piece in the middle (3) is disphyllum quadrigeminum (No idea about species level, but it seems there are also solitary species of Disphyllum) The remaining two (2&4) may be one species, but I have no idea. I would appreciate clues on the ID as much as on where to find more information on identification of devonian corals in general. Its getting dark, so I will try to take better fotos tomorrow. Best Regards, J

I went on a bit of an unusual fossil hunt this morning--in my office closet. I'm getting things packed up for a move next month to Gainesville, FL. We're moving up there from South Florida because I've had my fill of hurricanes (and year-round yardwork). In Gainesville I'll be able to volunteer more with the FLMNH. So I'm slowly repositioning the contents of my house into a growing stack of moving boxes. I got to the bottom corner of my office closet today and found a box that had some childhood memories in them. No favorite stuffed animals, no catcher's mitt and baseball, no cheap trophies for athletic prowess demonstrated. Nope, this was MY childhood and it was slightly (or more so) more eccentric than portrayed in Leave it to Beaver. My childhood contained as many science books as comics or Mad magazines. I had access to my dad's workshop and knew my way around a soldering iron building kits from Heathkit (a reference that will mean little to those of a younger generation). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit The box I found in my closet contained my first microscope--a simple little slide scope with a pair of AA batteries in the base for backlighting. It also had part of my childhood rock collection--some pyrite, a piece of green quartzite, an agate, and a heavy chunk of specular hematite (given to me my by 3rd grade teacher who knew I was a science geek). The best "discovery" was my nascent fossil collection. It had my first fossil book (copyright 1962): There were plastic bags filled with little scraps of poor quality fossils. I was living in Chicago at the time so my fossil horizon contained items mostly from the Ordovician, Silurian and Devonian. My 3rd grade teacher must have had a summer home up in the upper peninsula of Michigan (the likely source of the chunk of specularite) and she also gave me my first mystery fossil. It's a partial negative cast and I never could quite figure out what it was. I pressed clay into it as a kid to view its positive form and often suspected some form of trilobite. Could never make out any eyes on the end and looking at it now I suspect the "head end" may be some sort of pygidium. Maybe someone here may be able to hazard a guess. Several years ago Tammy and I visited the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in D.C. and of course spent an inordinate amount of time in the paleontology section. When I saw a nice example of a complete (and highly enigmatic) Recepticulites my mind went back to this piece that I found nearly 45 years ago. Most of the fossils that I collected myself were found wherever I had access to either beaches (like Lake Michigan) which had tumbled cobbles containing fossils or from a campground I remember a couple hours west of Chicago that used large rip-rap limestone boulders as erosion control where a road crossed over a large lake. So, in addition to bringing marshmallows for flambéing in the campfire in the evenings, and a fishing pole in attempt to see what types of fishes were hiding beneath the surface of the lake, I also brought a hammer and stone chisel--that's normal, right? I'd clamber around on the rocks looking for evidence of some poor quality fossil poking out here and there. I'd spend much more time than it was really worth freeing gastropod steinkerns, barnacles, crinoid stem segments, and other representative fossils of the time. I was always quite happy when I found find something that was included in my fossil guide book. Fossil books were few and far between in museum book shops and this was long before the ubiquity of the internet and longer before @Cris had the idea for TFF. I'll unpack this box again when we reach Gainesville and look back on my humble beginnings collecting fossils. I may organize some of these into a showbox display and hang it in my office in the new house. Back in the day I told (mostly adults) that I wanted to be a paleontologist when they asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Not hearing the expected answer of teacher, fireman, or astronaut (this was the era of the space race), the questioner would stare blankly at me till my grandfather or my parents would explain that it is someone who "digs up fossils". It took me a few decades but I've finally been able to travel around and "dig up fossils" if only on a serious avocational level. You'll see some indications that I was trying to be a serious collector back then. I had numbered several of my finds when I had made a potential identification. I had a notebook (long since vanished) where I recorded the collecting information and (probably) identification for my finds. The little adhesive numbered tags were cut from strips of numbered tape used to identify both ends of cables when building racks of switches and relays (back in the day before semiconductors). I have my first specimens of a rugose horn coral, a faint brachiopod, a crinoid segment, and my first worn partial trilobite. I remember some of these fossils and some I've long since forgotten about but the one that was the most surprising to see while picking through my old collection was a reasonable example of a Mazon Creek fern frond. While this is a well known fossil locality here on the forum (and beyond), I was surprised by this as Mazon Creek and its fossil lagerstätte had escaped my awareness till about a decade ago. Tammy and I were visiting the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago with our nieces and we happened upon the great exhibit they have there on Mazon Creek. That was the first time I was conscious of the fact that there was a great place to collect fossils relatively close to where I grew up but that fate and the relative lack of information back in the day had hidden it from me. Had I known about Mazon Creek back in the day and been able to amass a more impressive fossil collection as a kid I might not have chosen computers for a career. Actually, computer programming came natural to me like walking or breathing so computers were likely baked into my fortune cookie of fate and interest in fossils would rekindle later in life as it has. I still have no recollection of how this Mazon Creek concretion came into my possession. I can only assume that I received it as a gift from some adult trying to fan the flames of a passion for fossils. With the possibility of a long-term time-delay fuse this effort seems to have worked. Think about that next time you gift some fossils to a kid who shows interest. Cheers. -Ken P.S.: Tammy thinks I should choose one of these as a last minute entry for the FOTM contest since I (re)found them this month.

Is this a rugose coral?

Rugosa from Trout River Formation upper Devonian. 5cm in length.

Hi everyone, looking for some help in identifying some corals from the two beds in the Scottish Lower Limestone Formation, the Hurlet Limestone and the Blackhall Limestone. Both are Visean, Brigantian in age. Any help much appreciated! @TqB I'm hoping you might recognise them right away First these smaller specimens, all are from various outcrops across Scotland of the Blackhall Limestone. The largest 34mm long. Another from the Blackhall Limestone, this ones a bit larger at 85mm. Another from the slightly older Hurlet Limestone this time, 55mm long.

Dear all, if Devonian Epizoans (Epibionts) & Pathological Brachiopods (all the periods) are a fascinating group of fossils for you and you want to discuss anything about their paleoecology, please post your photos (specimens) in this thread.

For those that don't live and breathe fossils like we do, horn corals are often mistaken for horns, claws, etc. I knew someone who even swore the horn coral he had found was a fossil carrot, despite my insistence to the contrary. So after finding my best horn coral specimen ever (the largest one in this trio is about 9 inches long), I decided to make a cast of the specimen and "reconstruct" it to show people what they may have looked like when living. I know @caldigger will be very happy that there is now a horn coral action figure - complete with bioluminescence! Fossil next to "reconstruction" "Bioluminescent tips" @Bobby Rico, @Tidgy's Dad, @Nimravis

Hi! Here is a trip report on visiting a locality near Carlin, Nevada (one of our early videos). I'm not sure if what we decided to call "octopus beaks" (see 1:44 and image attached) are the real thing and not just fragments of brachiopods. Perhaps, somebody more knowledgeable can weigh in with the right answer. Thanks in advance!

This is a new one for me. A neat little button-like horn coral: Dipterophyllum glans from the Middle Mississippian Burlington Fm. of Iowa. Didn't know which forum to share this, so I thought I'd drop it off here for posterity (scale in mm)

So I’m still snowed in so here’s a trip from warm Early June. My friends and I wanted to hit all the closest rock locations around Salt Lake City and search for fossils and cool sedimentary geology (a couple of them being sedimentary geologists). We visited the Southern Oquirrh Mountains and a few canyons over on the east side of the valley at the base of the Wasatch Mountains. Here are the stratigraphy columns for both provided by Geolgic History of Utah by Lehi F. Hintze and Bart J. Kowallis. I did not lead this trip so I am not certain which rock layers the fossils were each from (I’ll point out the ones I do know) but I’ll say we went through the Cambrian and Mississippian in the Oquirrh Mountains and basically everywhere on the Salt Lake City column.

As there are some polished fossil-rock specimens from this formation in the Christmas auction, I would like to present some background info with (mostly) some field photographs, so I have put this in “Fossil Hunting Trips”. The Palaeozoic of Graz is a thrust sheet within the Eastern Alps, composed of Silurian to Pennsylvanian sediments. It consists of three separate nappes, the most fossiliferous formation is the Plabutsch-formation within the Rannach nappe. This Devonian formation is of Eifelian age (ca. 395 Ma), about 100 m thick and mostly made up of a very dark, gray-blueish to black, fine-grained, thickly bedded limestone. Superficially, it weathers to a medium to light grey color. Geological map of Styria with the Palaeozoic of Graz situated north of Graz. Stratigraphic column of the Rannach nappe of the Palaeozoic of Graz, Plabutsch-formation is Nr. 4. From Hubmann & Gross, 2015. Thicknesses of formations are not to scale! The Plabutsch-formation crops out at various places to the west and north of Graz and more than 100 fossil sites are known within this formation. The most abundant fossils are corals, brachiopods, stromatoporids and crinoid fragments. Other fossils like gastropods, bivalves or trilo-bits are very rare. In a paper from 1975, about 50 coral species are listed, but less than 10 are abundant: Tabulata: Favosites styriacus Penecke, 1894 Pachycanalicula barrandei (Penecke, 1887) Thamnopora boloniensis (Gosselet, 1877) Thamnopora reticulata (Blainville, 1830) Striatiopora? suessi Penecke, 1894 Rugosa: Thamnophyllum stachei Penecke, 1894 Zelophyllia cornuvaccinum (Penecke, 1894) Do you feel that there is something strange with this list? Yes, it is! Most species have their type locality within this formation and were first described by Penecke, except T. boloniensis (T. reticulata was also erected by Penecke as Pachypora orthostachys and later synonymized with an earlier described species). In my opinion, this does not reflect a high degree of endemism, but an urgent need for revision… The most abundant fossil is Favosites styriacus, which can form massive colonies up to 0.5 m in size. Here is an example from Hohe Rannach Mt. (1018 m) north of Graz, photo 05/26/2018, Col-Nr. 4093, length of pocket knife is 9 cm: As most fossils in this formation, it was found in scree and float in a wooded area. Nr. 4093 is waiting near the pocket knife toward the lower right corner… Another Favosites styriacus, north of Fürstenstand Mt. (754 m), northwest of Graz, photo 10/30/2015, not in collection. Tabulae are very well visible, weathering is usually your friend there!

Hi everyone, My niece found this item in Cape May NJ. During the years, I have found many Bryozoan pieces as well as many Tabulata and Rugosa. She thinks its a tooth... to me it looks like a colony of horn (Rugosa) corals.... what do you think? Thanks Pedro

Hi! I just received a couple nice works on Fossils. In Index Fossils of North America (1959) I see Pycnostylus (Fletcheria) listed as a Tabulate! (Subclass Schizocoralla) (Whitleaves 1884) Fossilworks lists subclass Rugosa fosillid shows the following: Hill, 1981. Rugosa and Tabulata Ivanovskiy, 1965. Fossil Rugosa Wow! What a way to confuse a newbie! My specimens I found match the illustrations and descriptions in Index Fossils, I am happy to say. It must be the German in me, but I go nuts for accurate taxonomy (when I can get it). How can this change? How can it be BOTH rugosa and tabulata? Can it? I know some things change with further research.... but THIS should be fairly elementary!!??!! I know the index is older... but I would not think THIS would change much up to today! Species, yes. Even genus, perhaps. But subclass? Sorry if I'm a bit confused! Hoping someone can shed some light on this! David Ruckser

First trip of the year today to the "Fossil Gardens" at Paulding, Ohio. This is quarry spoil of mid-Devonian age, Silica Formation. There was not a cloud in the sky, and temps were relatively warm at 43 deg. F. I was the only one there for most of the day, and it was extremely peaceful. What a great day. Here are pics of some of the finds. These are "farm fresh" and haven't even been washed yet, but I did take time to polish some horn corals and get some acetate peels (couldn't wait). A large Cystiphylloides rugose coral.