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Hi everyone this is matthew again saturday I went to the fossil and gem show in hamburg N.Y. and got 3 fossils one of them is a crinoid flower fossil and one of them is a strait shelled ammonite and one of them is a fossil that looks like a point.

Here was a nice surprise. I picked up this fossil cluster of barnacles and noticed a nice layer of agate underneath! When I processed the photo I took of it, I saw that the light from my flash dispersed giving this rainbow effect. It's very small but now when I hold to the light I can see the little rainbows! I heard this process is called diffraction grating. I would like to polish the agate but I think the rainbows will go away once the material is flattened.

I wanted to share the few fossils I have that aren’t stored away at the moment. I had to pack up everything I had about a year or two ago because I redid my floors. We are moving soon so I didn’t want to unpack everything again to display it again just to have to pack it back up again to move so about 75-80% of my fossils and gems are in storage. These are the few that I have displayed now. This is mostly just the stuff I picked up after I did the floors. I hope to share the rest of my collection when I get it all out again because that’s where most of my good stuff is.

I found this in online,the headline said it a dinosaur bone,its really look gem like and smoth surface...may it be a real dinosaur bone???

The BLM stopped by our museum today with a little surprise! I figured some people may be interested to see what exactly happens when the police and the state come to confiscate your fossils! Say you have just been reported for collecting fossils on BLM land without a permit. The BLM comes to your house and basically runs an audit on you. They want documentation and paperwork for every fossil you have. If you don't have a reasonable explanation for them, they start questioning everything! Once the BLM makes their decision you are given a court date and a judge decides what should happen next. The fossils, if it is decided they were illegally collected, become property of the state and are sent to a repository. Along with the fossils we received: photos of each piece of bone with a court number A piece of paper telling us what was there a box of bone (weighing about 14 pounds!) I did not photograph the photographs as I don't have the skills or ability to edit the logos and court numbers out. The first photo is our letter we received (if this shows too much can you please edit it further @Fossildude19) This photo is the bones that we were given. You can see some have been sliced and marked up, obviously this person was going to slab and cab these pieces most likely to sell. While these may just be chunkosaurus the most important thing to remember is that they were collected illegally. Regardless of what they are the individual did not have permits or permission to collect them. I was told by the officer that this was a multiple offense case. Each piece of bone brings a separate charge as well as a larger charge on a whole. We didn't discuss much beyond broad terms, but the investigation was closed and the state decided that we could use these bones for educational purposes! The good news for us, we get some cool chunkosaurus to show off! The down side is that people don't follow the rules and it puts legal collecting at risk for all of us!

Not any clubs in St. Louis specific to fossils in St. Louis. However I am going to become more involved with these folks. In fact I have to tip a hat to them for sparking my interest in the earth sciences back when I was a child. http://www.stlrockclub.com/about.htm Anyone know of clubs specific to fossils in STL?