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Hi everyone, I would like some help with 2 Late Campanian crab specimens found some time ago. The first is some type of crab claw. The second is a partial crab carapace. I haven’t been able to find anything that really matches them. They are both 1 centimeter in maximum dimension. Thanks for any help!

I think this is a piece of a crab, perhaps the ”torso”? I found a paper with crabs from Kristianstad basin, but only images of claws, and it is not part of a claw from what I can tell? https://sp.lyellcollection.org/content/434/1/241 The crab in the paper is named Protocallianassa. What do you think?

99% sure this is just a rock, but the shape just keeps me wondering... Found along the beach of Stratford Hall in Montross, Virginia on 7/6/19. Any thoughts?

Found this yesterday in Medina County, Texas. Any help is much appreciated. Part of a crab claw or leg are my thoughts, but couldn’t find anything that matched.

Well, I had another opportunity to hit the beach with the infamous Dr Mud... unfortunately not many photos this time, but we had had a tonne of fun... the Big D had a great day, I'll get some photos of his best finds up later.. but we sat down for a break.. you see that rock just behind him? Yep, it was a crab. A really sandy, flaky one but still another crab. @Doctor Mud - That big half I bought back to polish - it was a top not a bottom. As I cut it away it to flatten it - it all disappeared... We still came back with some goodies, and the big D got into prepping first thing this morning... He found a really nice black crab that he wanted to get into first, but I talked him into doing a pebble instead..

Hello gang, As promised this is where I will share specimens from my personal collection, my grandfather's collection, and the collection that was donated to the university I work for. The latter is interesting as it is literally boxes of rock and fossils, with no information and my university does not have a geology or paleontology department. I'll be updating it every so often. Enjoy! NOTE: Some of the donated items have old school "labels" on them. If you see initials or such that you recognize, please PM me, as I am doing my best to properly catalog them properly as part of my job!

I'm sure that the one long fossil is part of a crab leg but I can't seem to find anything on the web like it, all of the crab fossils I find appear to be your typical size crab such as the blue crab. This look like it would come from a very large crab. Came across what looked like other leg parts that appeared to be at least 6-8 inches. That second smaller piece, I don't have a clue. There's not much there to go on, just hoping that maybe someone will recognize the pattern on it and know what it belongs to. These were dug out of sandstone in which the bivalves and gastropods have been dated to about 2.5 million years old.

Finally finished up this pair of claws I believe belong to some species of Raninidae, though I'm far from certain. The concretion does contain at least some of the carapace, but it's in pretty bad shape. It seems to be badly crushed and poorly preserved. So I decided to leave that part alone for now and just prep out the claws, which were just starting to weather out of the front of the conc. Some day I hope to find a more complete specimen, but for now I'm pretty happy with this cool pair of claws.

So this material is from the Clayton formation in Arkansas. It is Paleocene in age. We are finding a lot of these flat pieces which I at first thought might be crab shells but now I think they must be scales from armored fish. Sometimes they are very thin and small - these examples are larger ones. If I am correct does anyone know if we can tell which fish they are from? (tape measure in view is in mm) The lone piece is from the same matrix as the others. After cleaning it up I would have guessed it was just a larger piece of armor but while I was removing it both ends broke off and it has some internal structures too. Also it seems to have tunnels that run through it that make me think of passages for nerves or blood vessels (bone? - it sure doesn't seem like it because it seems to have a shell). Here are pictures of its external and internal structures. The tube-like piece connects with one of the holes in the outside shell. I have taken pieces of all 4 exposed internal surfaces. It is not quite symmetrical which makes me think it isn't a crab . . . The fourth pic where a lot of the white matrix is visible is the back. I have been reluctant to clean it up since it is a bit fragile. Note: pics 5 & 6 (with the tunnel-like structure) have a bit of rubber cement on the surfaces - I had to retake the pics and had already begun to glue them back together

I recently finished this pulalius vulgaris and wanted to show it off. I may work on it more in the future when I get an air abrasive set up, but for now I'm pretty happy with it. It turned out well considering when I dug it out of the bank it rolled down the hill in two pieces. It was my first major repair and I have only prepped 7 or 8 of these. I think the practice is starting to pay off, but having a cooperative crab goes a long way. I know it's nowhere near the level of skill you see elsewhere on the forum, but I'm pretty dang proud of this one.

Thanks so much to @steelhead9 for preparing this crab for me, I thought his work was so good that I’d share it with everyone some of the legs are restored and it’s a puliarus vulgaris from washington

This crab along with another of the same type are currently with Torrey Nyborg of Loma Linda University in California. I'm told they are Paradoxicarcinus sp. (possibly P. nimonoides or maybe something new). At any rate Torrey Nyborg expressed interest in examining and describing them because he felt they may be something new. If they are indeed new and/or are published they will be donated to the Royal British Columbia Museum, in my hometown of Victoria (BC), not far from where these and other crab fossils were found).

This specimen of a possibly new crab (galatheoid? or homolodromid?) from southern Vancouver Island has been sent, for study and description, to Torrey Nyborg at Loma Linda University in California. The specimen is to be donated to the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC. I will update the forum once I've heard back from Torrey on the status of the specimen. Torrey has also expressed interest in a number of other decapod crustaceans collected in association with this specimen. So those fossils may eventually make their way (two already have) to him for description and potential donation to the RBCM.

Hello all, I'm going to be in Olympia at the end of July for a wedding and I was hoping to get out and look for a couple crab concretions while I was up there. Would anyone be able to give me some pointers on where to look, or be willing to meet up for a hunt while I'm up there?

About 3 or 4 years ago I made a trade with a guy from New Zealand. Today I received the last part of the trade. Apon opening it up I knew immediatly that it was broken!!! After taking off the bubble wrap my heart just sank and I could see it was in many pieces! Im going to have a very hard time sleeping tonight. This thing was HUGE!!! Just glad no one is here to see me cry. RB

Dying to find a good crab claw. Found this little tiny thing....it sure looks like a crab claw but I have a sneaking suspicion it's just a very good mimic of limestone rock. Please help me confirm or contest. Thanks!!!

Well preserved fossil described with 3d model too: https://www.cnet.com/google-amp/news/bizarre-chimera-fossil-reveals-platypus-of-the-crab-world/

Was out near Canyon Lake today and found these oddities. I think my expectations are overreaching my reality, but I sure would like these to be something other than just something boring, like worm burrows.....sorry worm burrows, no disrespect. Any help is appreciated! Crab Claws? Shrimp? Brittle Star Arms? Seriously...I know these are probably worm burrows, but hey, a girl can hope..... t

This is another piece discovered at an estate sale, which of course means I do not have the info such as location it was found, etc. It has some amazing detail, spiny legs? but it's so squished into the matrix I have no idea what it could be. Hope to receive more info. The piece is approx. 6 x 4"

Hello! I wanted to share some information and the published study of a crab carapace I recently donated to the New Jersey State Museum (NJSM). I found this last year in Monmouth County, New Jersey and thanks to suggestions from fellow forum members, as well as the NJSM, I sent this crab to decapod expert Dr. Rodney Feldmann to study. After review, it was determined that this crab represents a new genus and species and was recently published in the Mizunami Fossil Museum Bulletin. It was an absolute pleasure to work with Dr. Feldmann, who was kind enough to name it after me (Costadromia hajzeri). I also want to thank my good friends at the New Jersey State Museum, and everyone on the forum who helped ID this specimen. This was a really fun project to be involved in! @non-remanié @Trevor @Jeffrey P @Carl @FossilDAWG @Darktooth http://www.city.mizunami.lg.jp/docs/2019031400022/files/02feldmannschweitzer2019.pdf

In January, @Metopocetus and I met to do some map work and go through some old documents in search of productive exposures of the Eastover Formation (which generally lies on top of the Calvert Formation in Maryland and Virginia). Like all good fossil hunters, we met at dawn to do a little fossil hunting first. The wind chills were below zero (F), but there was a blowout tide. We each found a fossil shell or two and some cool pictures of interesting ice formations along the Chesapeake Bay (below) and then retired, thoroughly frozen to a warmer spot to do our map work. Working with some 50 year-old publications and field notes, we identified a passing mention to a tiny layer within the Eastover Formation that MIGHT have fossil crabs and a concentration of vertebrate material. Within a few weeks, @Gizmo and I had worked ourselves into a lather over the possibilities. The sites are remote. They are basically not documented in the modern literature and none of us could find any published record of crabs from the Eastover Formation. It sounded like a good chance at finding a new species. We found ourselves completely convinced that we could do the impossible: 1) drive hours to a waterway that we had no experience with, 2) use 50-year-old information to find the sites and 3) then identify the crabs in anonymous clay beds in shallow, freezing water On February 12, I met @Gizmo at our favorite meet-up in the pouring rain and air temps around 40F. We spent a tense couple of hours on the road wondering if hurricanes, weather or riprap had erased the sites. Just a bit after dawn, we put the boat into the water and set out into a cold and gray day. Within an hour we had checked several potential locations and found the sites to be almost exactly as described. Within two hours we identified two nearly complete crabs as well as a pile of other goodies ranging from shark teeth to random fish vertebra. However, we were pretty bummed out that we had only picked up two complete crabs on the beach. While the tide was out, we worked in clay slicks in shallow water to find more. On a hunch, we kept every nodule that we found. We couldn't see through the mud and clay, and the clay was nearly waterproof when wet. Impossible to clean the nodules. Plus, the water was just way too cold. Near the end of the day, Gizmo found a megalodon tooth and several nice makos. Soon after, we found an associated set of vertebra that I kept for trading. Anonymous vertebra and skeletal associations are fairly common in VA, but I hold onto them sometimes to use for trading with other collectors or for donating to classrooms. At the very end of the day, I stumbled on two seal bones, a humerus and metapodial, in the clay underwater. We quarried them quickly in the freezing water and scooted back to the ramp just before sundown. In cleaning up the nodules, I quickly found that the dried marl washed right off. In the course of an hour of cleaning I found 25+ crabs that were largely intact, as well a seal astragalus. In all, we ended up with several coprolites, several pounds of fish, seal and whale bones, a variety of shark teeth, and an ecphora. The little association of dolphin sized vertebra turned out to have some surprises. Three vertebra, with one complete, one with broken processes and one that has been sheared by a large shark bite (on the right). The sheared vertebra was buried in the clay underwater, but came out without any damage. The bitten surface is sheared smooth ( a modern break would be jagged) and has the profile of a large tooth (still trying to figure out how to get a profile+tooth photo).

hello all!! I found what I thought was just the end of a bivalve, but it has these odd bumps which I associate with crab fossils. (Not having found anything but a couple of partial claws, I am just guessing here). It was found in Blanco County in Central Texas, Glen Rose formation, I think. (second picture, couldn't get them in the right order. Sorry) The first picture is another find from that same place, the regular lines of dots intrigued me. Any info would be much appreciated!!

I thought I would check out a small exposure of what I think is Buda formation, I wasn't expecting much but I thought maybe I might get lucky, boy did I. The most interesting finds were two crab carapaces IDed as graptocarcinus texanus, (thanks Dan) enough talking, pictures!