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Hello, I have found these trilobites online and would like to know if they are real. 1.- Paralejurus rehammanus, Emsian Devonian, from Khebchia fm. 2.- Cheirurus (Crotalocephalina) gibbus, Middle Devonian, El Atchana, Alnif. I had to cover the name of the seller from one of the images. Thanks!

I will be visiting family around Christmas in Northern KY and was looking at trying out Trammel Fossil Park. This will be a new type of fossil hunting for me, as I am from SC and used to creek hunting for shark teeth and other sea fossils. Has anyone been to this park and would like to give opinions/advice/ pointers? Thanks for any help! I'm excited to look for some new types of fossils! ~Shannon

Beltzville State Park is one of those rare parks where collecting is allowed. The adjacent federal land, owned and operated by the Corps of Engineers to operate the dam there, is accessible ONLY WITH A PERMIT. It is a functioning spillway and there is a gun range for the local police, so you and USACE need to make sure you are safe. With that important disclaimer out of the way, here's the good stuff! Beltzville is a very productive Middle Devonian site which includes the PA State Fossil, the trilobite Eldredgeops rana. Although no one in the group found any definite complete buggies, a lot of froglike trilo faces went home in our buckets! It wasn't all trilos, though. We found bryozoa, corals, pteria oysters, gastropods, crinoids and probably a dozen kinds of brachiopods. I led this trip for the Natural History Society of Maryland. The trip director made this lovely video of our day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdB5atWQmeQ Yes, I realized about 20 minutes after she took that video of me showing off the pop-outs that I was holding the fronts of the cephalons of one species, not the eyeballs of the other. This is what I get for not looking with my reading glasses first! Most of my finds I gave to whoever was sitting closest to me, but here are a few I kept.

Hello everyone I'm farily new and love the hunt I dig alot on the bank in tully ny behind the gas station I know it's a good place for ppl getting into fossils these are before ill send pictures of after I clean them up if anyone can tell me if there is something I can coat the branches with I would be greatfull

Hello. I wonder wht genus/species these are. In my opinion, it's Phacops, Drotops, Holladops. I have more questions. How exactly do you tell the difference between Reedops and Phacops?

After a summer-long hiatus, I went out to look for some trilobites the other day. I wasn't finding much but the weather was just right: overcast, threatening rain clouds, periodic drizzle, a nice breeze, etc.. so I lost track of time. After a few hours and not finding much beyond the usual suspects,, I was getting ready to leave. I split one more and this block contained three Cerauromeros hydei cephali and upon taking a closer look seemed to show indications of being complete. Gravicalymenes, brachiopod 1 2 3. This one appears to be enrolled. Note the pygidial spine. This will be challenging to prep but I'm going to work on it today. Number 1 prep progress And..ta-da! A little rough, but the matrix wasn't cooperating. The pygidial and genal spines didn't break off during prep, they just weren't there. Dissolved in fossilization. Still happy with these rare finds. I will post results if the roller turns out ok.

Hello! I have been lurking on this Forum for a while because I was very busy lately and still is! I found few fossils and I thought it might be trilobits- pieces of trilobite and also something else that I thought it seems 'fishy' and somewhat resemble a fish spine. These fossils are not found in situ but the bedrocks are Silurian. If they are trilobites, it would be my first time found one! I found this on the beach of Lake Erie, just east of Toledo, Ohio two weeks ago. Approximately half centimeter. Yesterday, I found this fossil on the beach of Lake Michigan in Kenosha, Wisconsin - just north of Illinois state line. It looks like a cross section of a trilobite to me. Approximately a centimeter and half wide. Unknown and resembles a fish spine, approximately two centimeters long. Thank you in advance and I am looking forward to seeing the responses!

Greetings everyone! Today I had the very special opportunity to collect in the Whetstone Gulf formation at Martin Quarry. I had a really great time and I just wanted to share some of my finds with you fine fossil forum folks! Enjoy

Hi all. Managed to get out to Penn Dixie fossil park a couple weekends ago. Trilobite pieces and brachiopods from the Moscow formation. The lone head is the same on with a scale, one shown under magnifying glass. The same with the two bodies. The trilobite head looks like it's from an Eldredgeops rana. And the brachiopods Mediospirifier audaculus (lone) Rhipidomella sp .(pair). Thanks for viewing.

Today I took a trip to a new outcrop of the Leighton Formation! My main interest in this new outcrop is to find the source of my original material. The first outcrop I visited actually turned out to be an erratic. When I first visited there in February the ground was completely frozen. I found a large piece of shale sticking out of the ground, which I proceeded to split, but the rock itself did not come out. This rock yielded about 50 pounds of material on the first trip. When I returned in June I excavated around the supposed outcrop, and found that it was in a fact an erratic rock. I also found three other large pieces that were also from the Leighton Formation. Since my first site turned out to be a dud, I am now trying to find new sites. This is the first of three possibly accessible sites to visit. I am mainly looking for the presence of thelodont scales - specifically, those that belong to the species Phlebolepis elegans. I am also looking for a few species that I don't have in my collection yet or I require for research: the tentaculite species T. elongatus, the trilobite species Acastae zerinae, two species in the genus Actinopteria, the undescribed Calymene species that has been mentioned in earlier posts, and eurypterid fragments. Today was an absolutely beautiful day to do it. It was cool and overcast in the morning, but then cleared up towards the end of the trip - perfect collecting conditions. Here are some pictures of the walk (in chronological order). Once at the outcrop, the Leighton shale member was quite obvious. It was one excellent outcrop, although I didn't find all the species I was looking for. I might have found thelodont scales, but I will not know for certain until I examine the material closely. The fauna of this formation was similar to that in the erratics I found, with a few marked differences. One is the abundance of the brachiopod species Chonetes bastini, it was the by far most common brachiopod. Also, the characteristic Salopina brachiopod fauna was barely represented in this outcrop - I might have got two specimens of them. Camarotoeichia leightoni was more common, but still relatively scarce compared to the C. bastini. Only the tentaculite species T. elongatus was in the outcrop, the other species of Tentaculite (which I have not identified), was completely absent. The bivalve species Modiolopsis leightoni was amazingly prolific. On to the geology of the site. Almost the entire outcrop was of made of a highly fractured gray shale that split extremely easily. In this slate, there were occasional pockets of a type of siltstone. The siltstone pockets usually contained a large amount of gastropods of the genus Australonema, with possible fish fragments. There were extremely fossiliferous layers every 5 - 10 centimeters. In between these layers there were still some fossils, but generally there were less molluscs or ostracods. Most of the C. bastini brachiopods were in between the fossiliferous layers. I only collected from one of the outcrops that was there, two others were situated to the left and right of this one. They had the same general geology and fauna - at least, according to my rather quick check. Below are a few pictures of the outcrop I collected at: the first is from the front of it, and the second is from behind it. Here are a few insitu photos of some of the fossils. The first is of what I guess is an A. zerinae trilobite cephalon, prep will reveal if it actually is. The second is of one of the highly fossiliferous layers I was talking about - notice the enormous profusion of ostracods, with a few brachiopods and mollusks. On the way back there were a few red shale pieces I took a look at. I think they are from the Hersey Formation, probably brought in by the tidal current. The first picture shows one of the rocks, and the second is of a brachiopod external mold peeking out. I hope to update this thread with further pictures of the fossils collected. To be continued.... Thanks for reading!

Hi all Just a quick question , I have been very interested in the material from Mazon Creek since I won a great auction lot from Ralph that included a few fine specimens . While looking today online I spotted a trilobite pygidium that was labelled Mazon Creek it looks like the right type of siderite concretions but it could be from some where else . So what do we think? I don’t think they was native to Mazon creek but maybe transported there by floods ?

I received a couple of trilobites, which the seller has given me the description, as unknown. (He has me fried). See if anyone can help. In photo 1 .... With 2 centimeters long, (it comes from the Cambrian Tenprano (quiongzhusi formation, Yunnan - China) Could it be a kind of Maotunia? The other, Ordovicio ... 1 centimeter long. (Baoshan - Yunnan, Shihtian formation, China). Encrinoides enshiensis? I saw it in a thread on this forum, and it looks like it, but it was from the Silurian. Any clues on that stain?

I had the opportunity to visit another Silurian site in the northern Georgia/southern Tennessee area. This is now the third such site I've visited, but the first in the Rockwood Formation as opposed to the Red Mountain Formation. As far as I can tell there's very little different between the two lithologically and paleontologically, with the Rockwood and Red Mountain occupying pretty much the same stratigraphic position. The difference seems to be that the TGS prefers to use the term "Rockwood" to describe it's Niagaran Silurian system and the GGS and AGS prefer the term "Red Mountain", mostly because the unit is more differentiable in Tennessee whereas in southern NW Georgia and Alabama it is less differentiable. However, the GGS does use the term Rockwood in some of it's reports, and there are some lithological differences between the more southerly and easterly exposures and the more northerly and westerly ones (most notably in the thickness of the hematite beds), so I'm going with Rockwood Formation for these specimens. I had some difficulty in telling the age of the rocks at first. The geologic map I was using wasn't very accurate, and had both the Rockwood Formation and some upper Ordovician units within close proximity to each other. As you'll see with some of the fossils, there are some forms more associated with the Ordovician, such as Isotelus and Vinlandostrophia (Platystrophia), but at the same time I couldn't help but notice there were some similar characteristics between this fauna and the Rose Hill Formation, such as the calymenid molt fragments, and prevalence of Leptaena, which I did not find in the nearby upper Ordovician rocks (not to say it doesn't occur in the Ordovician, just that I didn't find it). Combined with the presence of Eospirifer and the thin beds of iron-rich sandstone and ferruginous limestone, this site is most likely in the Silurian Rockwood Formation. However, in my opinion, it appears to host an earlier, transitionary fauna than the Rose Hill. The collecting itself was pretty easy. The weather was nice, the site not too hard to explore, and the fossils easily extracted from the rock. Most of the exposure was unfossiliferous, however every now and then I'd come across a little part where there'd be a densely packed assemblage, with some loose specimens scattered about. The shale and thin limestone were the most fossiliferous. The first up are some of the brachiopods. A couple of different species it looks like, both tentatively of the genus Dalmanella sp. The report I'm basing this on is pretty old so that name probably no longer applies, however. These are pretty good examples of the more Ordovician forms present at this site. Although Vinlandostrophia (Platystrophia) sp. does occur in the Silurian as late as the Waldron Shale, it is definitely more common in the Ordovician, where V. ponderosa forms veritable coquinas in the upper Leipers Formation. It's a bit hard to see in the bottom one, but it does have a sulcus, unlike most of the Dalmanella sp. present. A few Leptaena sp. Although it is known from the upper Ordovician, I have not found it in the Ordovician rocks nearby and have found several in the Silurian Rose Hill Formation. It is interesting to note that there are such similarities between the two early Silurian fauna across such distances. One characteristic I quickly noticed was that a lot of the specimens in this area occur as loose shells, whereas in Maryland and Pennsylvania they're often internal molds wedged in rock. It makes for easier collecting, and more photogenic fossils! I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is Dalmanella elegantula(?) Pretty good preservation on this one, but I'm not quite sure about it's ID. Maybe some kind of Chonetes (?) sp. Eospirifer sp. with crystalline preservation.

I am going to be in Missouri for a few days and I am looking for places to hunt for trilobites. Thanks in advance.