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Ok..so far I’ve posted my turrilites and my woodbine ammonites, next will be these eopachydiscus ammonites and my oxytropidoceras, with echinoids and most (some are at the beauty shop) of my mortoniceras ammonites. these eopachydiscus ammonites represent at least a couple of different species from the looks of it, though I am not knowledgeable regarding scientific names, I just know they look different! LOL..no preparation has been applied other than soap/water and a little careful chiseling of matrix that I thought I could tackle. One of the big ones cracked in half due to it being my first big one to remove. I used Elmer’s glue and crushed limestone to fill the crack but I’ll likely soak it to get it out and replace it with an epoxy. Another one is cracked but never broke, I put super glue in the cracks just in case. Nice sutures on a few! 2 of the smaller eopachydiscus are 11-12 inches across, the biggest is around 17 inches, most are 14-15 inches.

I had to return some clothes to the shopping mall yesterday. Rather, I volunteered to return them with a spot in mind that is right next to the mall where I found some big boy ammonites, eopachydiscus upwards of 15-19inches. The rain uncovered a nice one that was in loose soil. For some reason, many of the ammonites in this creek are really worn down in the center. How do you all handle removing matrix if you’re concerned about leaving a hole in the middle? I’m thinking I can simply “file” down the matrix until it looks like it’s as far as I can go using some sort of air abrasive tool? This one is 15.5 inches and I like the symmetrical shape and visible ridges. Many eop. I find are smooth around the outside without the wavy appearance. Different species?

At two different times this year (but at the same basic location), I found sense interesting ammonites that both contained other ammonites inside. This is near Johnson/Tarrant County borders in North Texas. The first shown is an eopachydiscus in fairly rough shape that has a hamite embedded. The second is a mortoniceras with two extremely tiny mortoniceras ammonites visible inside. I’m guessing the smaller ones settled on the ocean floor after the larger ones and actually ended up inside those larger ammonites? I am not an expert on these so I appreciate your input!

I went to my first show in Glen Rose over the weekend. I met some great people and had a good time! I managed to only buy 2 fossils….LOL! I sold everything I didn’t want to keep from my entry year to collecting halfway through the show, which amounted to a lot..I will miss some of the big eopachydiscus (19 incher was sold) but I have bigger ones I kept at home..also sold one of my nice oxytropidoceras but have 3 big ones at home. I’m ready to replenish my empty bedroom with new fossils! I was also really proud to see how well Mercer Brugler cleaned up the mortoniceras he got from me that I originally found this summer, if you saw them when I gave them to him you wouldn’t recognize the fossils..very motivating to learn how to clean them like he does.

Hello everyone , this is my first post on here so go easy on me lol. I just bought this Eopachydiscus and im waiting on it in the mail. Is there anything i can do to clean it up a little ? or do you think i sjhould just leave it as is? thanks for your time ! p.s -its 12 inches across if you needed an idea of size.

I went hunting Tuesday before last to a new place over in Benbrook, TX about an hour away. A newer TFF member, Cory had blind messaged me telling me about a place over near Ft. Worth. He thought I might be interested in seeing them. He invited me to come check it out. I get messaged a lot on social medial by complete strangers. So that part was nothing new. I don’t respond to the majority of the messages. With all of the messages I have gotten I have never had a stranger invite me to meet him somewhere, but that was basically the scenario. Sounds like the perfect scenario for something bad to happen though. So I was a bit leery. I didn’t intend to go, but I checked out his post to see what he was finding at the site. It was a lot of the typical Duck Creek ammonites and echinoids. The echinoids intrigued me. I had quite a few of that kind, but the quality was better than what I had. Also, the Mortoniceras ammonites were of good size and quality. The ones I have are fairly small. I have more Eopachydiscus than any other ammonite. So those did not hold much appeal. In his post he had invited other people to come check the place out so that made me feel a bit better. I'm still not sure how he found me or why he messaged me. Maybe it was one of my posts from a fossil hunt over in Ft. Worth he had seen. I had requested the day off work for that Tuesday weeks before to run some errands and go to an event, but the event got canceled so I had some extra time I didn’t expect to have. I was bummed that the event got canceled. Nature and the outdoors are my happy places. Fossil hunting cheers me even more. So I thought of places I could go. I had to be back by 5:00 though to pick up my daughter. So I couldn’t heard out to NSR. I decided to take a chance and head over to the place in Benbrook. I PM'd Cory on TFF and he sent me the address and his telephone number. I messaged someone to let them know where I was going and what time I planned to leave. It was in an open construction area and other people would be around so that helped put my mind at ease. I don’t tend to be paranoid about harm from strangers, but I like to be safe. I am a person of faith and I tend to hold the philosophy that if it isn’t your time to go nothing will happen to you. If it is your time to go, there is nothing you can do to stop it. I know a lot of women who limit themselves in where they can go and what they can do out of fear of what may happen to them if they go somewhere alone. I don’t fit in that category of not going out of fear. It may put me at greater risk, but so far I haven't come to harm only by the grace of God I am sure. Since the place was a new development it didn’t come up on my map apps. I had to wing it and used the satellite view to find the general area under development. I pulled into the development. It was quite large. Between the 2 sections it looked like it could easily be 150 acres if not more. Maybe only about 20% of the lots had homes on them. I had no idea where Cory was or how to find him. I was ok hunting without bothering him at work. I was still uneasy about it, but I thought I should meet him to thank him for letting me know about the site and inviting me. I am a pretty shy person. Breaking the ice is the hardest thing for me. I feel awkward and am afraid I won't know what to say, I'll say something stupid or I'll say something and there will be one of those awkward silences. But I let the rules of proper social decorum motivate me to break the ice and go meet him. He had also said he had a lot of questions about the fossils. I told him I wasn’t sure I could answers his questions, but I’d try to answer what I could. I wanted to keep my word. I parked my car on a corner surrounded by vacant lots. I messaged him to let him know I was there providing him with the street names on the signs on the corner. I got out and walked around. Within the first 5-7 minutes of walking around I found 2 decent little ammonites, which I believe are both Mortoniceras. One has more prominent tubercles than the other. Here’s the first I little ammonite I found on top of a fragment from a large Eopachydiscus. I am holding them my hand, but the fragment is so big you can barley see my hand is there. The little ammonite is 9 cm across. About that time he messaged me back and then tried to describe how to get to him. I told him I’d hunt where I was a bit longer and then come over to where he was. While I hunted around I snapped pics of the flowers and plants. Here are a few. This looks a little like phlox, but I’m not sure if it is since phlox was out in early April. Also, these are on a single stalk densely covered with small leaves. The phlox I know don’t look like that Not sure what this, but it looks cool. The leaves are fuzzy. The shoots are 12-15 inches tall. This is a Texas thistle. Believe it or not this is my favorite wildflower. The blooms can be up to 2 inches across and occasionally 2.5. They look a bit like pompoms, but aren’t quite so round. The color is just a bit off in the pic though. They are slightly more of a fuchsia color. They’re pretty cool looking. The plant is very prickly as you can see in the pic. They are difficult to pick. I usually have to take thick rubber gloves and use garden clippers. The look is not what made them my favorite flower though. It is their behavior and movement that I find so intriguing and mysterious. The first time I picked a bouquet of these I arranged them in a vase and made a nice rounded bouquet. When I got up in the morning they were completely rearranged. I asked my kids if they had played with them. They had not. I rearranged them into a nice rounded bouquet and went about my day. A couple hours later I noticed it was rearranged again. I don’t know what makes them move. It is not phototropism or the typical type of chemotaxis. They will move themselves at night and may move as much as 2 inches in 8 hours. It is astonishing and quite remarkable to me. I love it! They have an independent spirit, kind of like me. I remember we had a form of these growing on the edge of the forest in the clearing where our house was when I was a girl living in the Boston Mountains of Arkansas. The bears use to come into the clearing to eat these. They look like they would be very painful to eat, but the bears seemed to love them for their sweetness. I’ve never eaten one, but they smell delightfully sweet almost like honey.

Last Saturday I took a break from the Austin Chalk experiment that I am conducting. I decided to go hit a Lower Cretaceous-aged, Washita Group, Pawpaw formation site I have not been to in a while. It was pretty successful. I was able to find many near complete and partial examples of crabs, mostly of the genus Xanthosia. I believe I found 2 species of that genus. I got one nice Cretacorina (may have butchered that name) and a few examples of an elongate crab as well. There were also a few partial examples of lobster, Linuparis. Add in a couple of Leptostyrax macrorhiza and Cretolamna appendiculata shark teeth, and a few fish vertebrae, and it was a pretty good trip. There were even a couple of dwarf ammonites present, which is fairly rare for this particular site, though not really that rare in the Pawpaw. On the way home I passed right by a Duck Creek Formation site my father and I collected together probably 20 or 25 years ago. I did not believe there would be any fossils there, but remembering the times he and I had, I stopped anyway. There were a few Mortoniceras ammonites there, and at the bottom of the hill someone had apparently highgraded a large but partial example of an Eopachydiscus marcianus ammonite. I left it there for the next guy. I found one of the morts in a block of Duck Creek limestone. I took a picture of it as I found it. Then there is another picture of what it looked like when I removed the matrix block from around the ammonite. It was almost complete and not nearly perfect, but a reminder that sometimes these ammonites only show you a little and have a lot more hiding underneath the matrix. I have included a lot of images, some of the fossils as they looked in the field and some group shots as well.