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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