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Hello fossil enthusiasts, some of you know, I have a on-off-relationship with this forum, and it seems, now is on-time again. I have a general question, and maybe some of you can help me. In the countries of the southern coast of the baltic sea (and very special in the northern half of germany) we have only fery few sites with exposed fossiliferous bedrock, but quite a nice ammount of collectors. In the eastern half of Germany, situation was additinally bad for decades because of the cold war, where it was nearly impossible for east german collectors to visit sites outside of the country, even not in the eastern countries of the former USSR. Lucky us, we have an iceage some years ago, which shaved the baltic craton and scratches out the basin sediments from the hole we now call the Baltic sea. The glaciers depositet all the stuff on the other side of the scandinavian peninsula, and therefore we have opportunities, but also a hard life as collectors. Why this? Lucky thing, we can find fossils from the Precambrian up to the Quaternary (for geological reasons: except from Carboniferous/Permian material, and Devonian and Triassic stuff is very rare (what is meant by this I will explain later)). And we can made all this finds at the same time even in a few squaremeter outcrop. If someone is generally geological interested, he can find rocks from 2.7 billion years of earth history at the same place. Our shores (and gravel pits) are, as far as I know, the place where you can find the most diverse (naturally) rock assamblage worldwide (geolocial museum collections are excluded ) A lot of specimen are described of those rocks, not known from the host strata in Scandinavia or the Baltic States. Unfortunally, you have to know a lot about rocks to exclude the fossil empty types, and fossils are generally rare. ("rare" means here, you find only some on one day excursion, and maybe there is not a single one you decide to implement to your collection. "rare" in the above mentioned case means, you might find only one fossilisferous (devonian, triassic,...) rock in your collectors life. So, I try to set a point. We have here a semiprofessional association, the GfG (http://www.geschiebekunde.de/, only in german, sorry for this), with some publications online (http://www.geschiebekunde.de/publikationen/geschiebekunde-aktuell-ga/ , http://www.geschiebekunde.de/publikationen/ga-sonderhefte/ ). And we are interested: are there collectors, masochistic enough to live with only a few gut sometimes exceptional finds, harvesting the glacial deposits of North America for rocks and fossils? I know that there should be also geological diverse gravels due to the geological heterogenity of the northern part of the North American Shield... To show our diversity, I can post some of our fossils from different ages here in this topic... Best regards from overseas (or using the old miners phrase: Glück Auf! ) Johannes

Dear Guys, In a time of two years I collected these gastropod fossils in dolomite erratics of Varena town, South Lithuania. There are many Naticopsis, Euomphalus like snails and also Worthenia, Omphalotrochus and Anomphalus are identified. The temporal range of the majority of these gastropod genera begins in Devonian and ends in Triassic or even early Jurassic. I would think these dolomites are Carboniferous or Permian in age but I would like to be sure which epoch they belong to and what other fossils I can expect to find in the future. Any help will be appreciated! Best Regards Domas At first, I will show Naticopsis like snails.

Dear Guys, I collected some interesting specimens in Jurassic- Early Cenozoic erratics like sponges, bryozoans and hexacorals and also two primitive Ordovician sponges. The sponge pieces are 3-8 mm length (In yellowish limestone on sponge has very interesting skeleton growth outside). The size of coral in greenish gray limestone is 9 mm diameter, in the white limestone- 7 mm diameter. The bryozoans are from 7 mm to 1 cm length, they web shaped. Please help with ID of these fossils if you could. Best Regards Domas 1. Late Jurassic sponges in my opinion. 2. Early Cretaceous (?) sponges. 3. Late Cretaceous- Paleocene sponges I think.