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Here is a smattering of my finds from May 2016 up until last week! Good season already! I don't own an air eraser yet so I haven't done any detail prep work on anything yet. Small enrolled Eldredgeops

Hello Everyone! First off, I am excited to be part of this amazing forum! I am excited to be here and it is really cool to be part of a community where questions are open and people are so willing to help other out! I have never operated a forum before so this is a first for me and this is my first post in my first forum.... so needless to say I am a little excited! lol Please know that my writing style may change over time as I learn about writing in a forum and about posting my own work here on this forum. I am hopping to keep a relaxed, but professional forum running. I am hoping to also post at least once a week during the summer. Once I go back to school in the fall I hope to keep posting, but if it was like last semester, that may not be possible. I will post as much as I can though, that you have my guarantee! Last semester I took a paleobiology class here at the U of U. I throughly enjoyed it, I especially loved the invertebrate sections on cephalopod, arthropods, and the phylum echinodermata. I unfortunately only have a small selection of crinoid stems, so there is not much to post about there. I knew about ammonites (a cephalopod) and trilobites (an arthropod). I did not know much though. I new ammonites had a round shell that was coiled in on it's self and that was about it. I knew that trilobites got more complicated as they diversified and that they had 3 lobes, but that was it. Then I took the class and learned a whole lot about them! It was so much fun! What I learned about them is not the scope of this forum, if you want to know more about them I would recommend the text book we used. It is very good at explaining everything to inexperianced people (such as my self) and has lots of references for additional reading. The book is called "Bringing Fossils To Life An Introduction to Paleobiology" 3rd edition. It is quite a remarkable book. The fossils were collected in the House Range in Millard Country outside of Dugway Utah. I collected a few pounds of shale and it was quite full of trilobite fossils. The environment they lived in was a shallow marine environment. The matrix around the fossils is a beige color. I use a SE 979fSG Flexible Shaft Grinder, Chuck, Pedal, and Switch. You can pick one up from amazon for $70 or so. I also use steel saw blades for the Dremel tool and some steel brushes for it as well. I have other tools for the dremel but have not used them yet. I use these because I do not have access to any other tools for cutting stone. Please be safe while using this. I strongly recommend gloves, safety glasses, and a face mask to filter out dust, i would also recommend hearing protection. It can be loud at times. I also wear a white lab coat to keep dust off my and my cloths. For fossil identification I have been using a small guide to trilobites that my professor gave me. I looked on line for definitive trilobite's located in the Marjum Formation and was not successful. I do not claim to be a trilobite expert, and as such I may have made mistakes with their identification. If you feel I was wrong please feel free to let me know what you think they are! There are several samples that looked so much like they were Elrathia or Marjumia (these will be posted later) that I may have been wrong in my identification. All these fossils are from the Marjum formation and I found them so I know they are all real. So here are some pictures I took of them. If they are too small let me know and I will try to upload larger pictures. I have also labeled each so if people are talking about a specific one they can reference them exactly. B refers to bathyuriscis and the number corresponds to the order I took the pictures in. I will add other spices later and they will have a different letter abbreviation. I do have other bathyuriscus fossils pictures to post, I will add them later. Right now I just want to get started! B1 B2 B3 B4 B5 B6 B7 B8 B9 B10 B11 B12 B13 B14 B15 B16 B17

Driving west on Route 20 towards my favorite Middle Devonian Hamilton sites in Madison County I always pass this limestone road cut on the west side of Schoharie County just outside the tiny hamlet of Leesville, NY. It is an exposure of the Lower Devonian Kalkberg Formation, part of the Helderberg Group amd it's richly fossiliferous. I have collected from there in the past and there's a nice-sized Favosites (tabulate coral) that I've been trying to release from the wall for the past few years now. Each time I stop there I give it a few more whacks from my sledge, but so far it won't budge. This spring on yet another foray to Central NY, I was in no rush and decided to give that Favosites a few more whacks. Again, no luck, but I noticed a nice Machaeraria formosa (brachiopod) lying free from the matrix, a nice consolation prize. I decided to spend a few more minutes checking out the site to see what else had weathered free and did pick up a number of specimens. The next day, on my way home I stopped again and checked out the road cut on the other side of the highway and collected a few more things. In addition to what I picked up there were scores of crinoid stem discs scattered about, bryozoans, and of course brachiopods. Maybe some day I'll spend a bit more time there. A pair of Machaeraria Formosa, a Pentamerid brachiopod. My only previous one has just a single valve. Both of these have two. Not sure on the ID of this single valve specimen. I'm guessing Uncinulus campbellanus, a Rhynchonellid brachiopod.

every year Kim & I make our annual trip with the dry dredgers to Penn-Dixie in Hamburg, NY and Ridgemont Quarry in Ft Erie Ontario, Canada. We always bring home a couple of 5 gal. buckets of slate to have something to check out during the snow days of winter. Found this small mortality group of trilos and it cleaned up pretty nice, so you never know what you might throw away or bring home.

My son (12) and I are going back to my home state of Wisconsin for a trip this week. Can anyone point us to a few spots that do not need permission to collect, or provide the names/numbers/places of the good places? We will be in the Madison area for several days, and then north to near Phillips (side trips okay). Nik wants to be a paleotologist and the fossils here in California are few and far between relative to WI. Your help would be greatly appreciated. I want to continue his interest in fossils, but it is hard to peak their interest if you can't find anything!

I obtained a few unprepped Moroccan trilos from a TFF member. Would anyone be able to identify the bugs in the photo?? They have not yet been air abraded.

I received a quantity of Wheeler shale as a gift, but I can't figure out how to split it. The Internet has not been very helpful. I am using a flat chisel, but the shale is breaking off in small fragments instead of splitting down the middle. I do not want to damage the trilobites that are possibly inside. Do any experienced shale splitters have any advice?

Compared to 2014, this season has been a bit of a disappointment as far as finding complete trilobites. True, I found a couple nice Greenops at Deep Springs Road, including one at the TFF gathering last spring. Figuring I had one last chance to make good before winter snows hit, I traveled up to eastern Madison County in Central Upstate New York to an exposure of the Middle Devonian Skaneateles Formation, part of the Hamilton Group. It was my second time there this year and the last time produced one of my best Dipleura dekayi cephalons. I hoped to do at least as well on this, what is likely, my final trip there of the season. I arrived before ten in the morning. Day was crisp- high thirties to low forties, sunny. There were a number of sandstone blocks lying at the foot of the exposure I didn't recall seeing the last time I was there. I proceeded to split these and the second block yielded this: the thorax and pygidium of a Dipleura, the best Dipleura thorax/pygidium I've found so far this year. Soon after I found a partially exposed cephalon of another Dipleura. A little careful chiseling and repair work I was able to expose the whole thing:

Hi everyone, I was given these two samples containing trilobites and the one with a fossil leaf. I was told that the two trilobite specimens are out bowling green,mo, my club is the EMSP.Also, can anyone help me with the identity of the leaf. Thanks for any help anyone can give.

Hello everyone, I have been reading this site for a while now, and have decided to join! You can blame some of our friends, as they asked my family and I to join them on a trip to Arkansas which included a trip to the Crystal and Diamond sites... I know you all know the feeling of sticking your hands in the mud and knowing there is something in there... Long story short, they lit the fire in me again... Though an avid picker upper of odd rocks and fossils my whole life, I have renewed my 45 year quest for a trilobite. Having grown up in north Alabama, there was not much use in looking... I later moved to Tennessee some 20 years ago, but did not think of hunting the rock for real... Fast forward: Two months of research into the rock in my area, and TADA!!! A Trilobite tail. Now, I know that Tennessee is not really known for Trilobites, but the rock says it should be. At least in the Nashville Dome area. All that said (a long winded introduction) I am very happy to be here and look forward to talking and learning with you all!!! Peace The Trilobite is in the lower left corner of the pic!!!