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I mentioned in a recent post that I was heading off into the field, or in this case the woods, again. It's getting to be a habit with me that I don't think to take my camera until it's to late, so, true to form, I forgot it again. This is why I've titled this with "Crate", since that's all I have to show for the trip to begin with. My plan was to go to my favorite Callovian site in order to finally fulfill my recurring dream of a large, well-preserved Bullatimorphites and/or Cadoceras ammonite. I always drive down to the end of a forestry road and park the car under the trees before I mosey off to the site, but this time it didn't quite pan out. The farther on I drove into the woods, the more the snow and ice had accumulated, so when I turned around and reversed into my parking spot, I noticed for the first time that I had to drive slightly uphill in order to complete the maneuver. Problem was that I couldn't, since the wheels were running on the spot and digging deeper into the quagmire every second. My head became immediately filled with visions of walking the 5 kilometers back to the next village in search of a tow truck or a frendly farmer, but after I'd settled down a bit, I decided that the best thing would be to get out of the car and assess the situation first. Fortunately, being a serious fossil collector, I always have a plethora of tools of all sorts in the trunk, so I selected my trusty pickaxe and spent the next half hour shaving the 5-inch layer of ice, mud and decaying leaves down to the gravel roadbed. Then, easing off in second gear, I managed to get back to dry land, so to speak. Thank goodness! It was at this point that I also decided that since I hadn't brought along my downhill skis, I would forgo slipping and sliding to a site which is more than likely still buried under a foot of snow. Fortunately this area has a good number of sites to chose from, so after a bit of driving around, I managed to find one on the hills of the Scheffheu which is pretty well free of snow and spent the rest of the day exploring and chipping out the odd fossil. This time it's a selection from the Aalenian and Bajocian of ammos and bivaves along with one belemnite, all of which need a good bit of prep.

The title is rather self explanatory looking for a contact, someone in an institution such as museum or university who has some specialty in vertebrae paleontology from the Jurassic era. Any help is greatly appreciated I Have already contacted Joseph Sertich from the Denver museum of science but have received nothing back (nearly a month ago) and the possibility he is away on a field expedition currently and might not be back for some time. Thanks as always Matt

Today is my last day off of work which means I have time to do fossil stuff. It is also the last day for a little while that I will be discussing dinosaur fossil very much. We have shark programs starting at the end of this month so my mind has to get back on the sharks. Dinosaurs go on the back burner again for awhile. I will post a bit more of the collection but I also wanted to share a little bit about my experience with Jurassic dinosaur fossils during the early stage of building our collection. Hopefully it provides something useful to another collector. As we started window shopping in preparation for beginning a dinosaur collection, one thing stood out about fossils from the Jurassic era. They are expensive. The prices are so far out of my range that I did not bother to research them beyond the ones we first encountered from various dealers. I would have to sell a kidney to get a hold of anything from that era. I saw sauropod teeth for up to 2500$ and none under 600. Don't get me started on theropods from that era. It all looked just too expensive. Our collection is built on inexpensive fossils from formations (Bull Canyon, Kem Kem, Judith River, Hell Creek) that produce some great bargain stuff. i saw nothing in the way of bargain fossils from the Jurassic beyond bits of bone or bits of bone assigned a species even though I doubt you could assign a species to those bits. They are chunkasaurus not Camarasaurus is my theory lol Anyway, I had little belief that we would add anything Jurassic except for the chunkasaurus bones for kids to handle. It did bother me though that we would have a glaring hole in the program. Kids associate the Jurassic era with dinosaurs and vice versa thanks to the movies Jurassic Park. Even if the dinosaurs from those movies were not Jurassic, the word association is unavoidable. I decided to back track the origins of the super expensive fossils from that era. I have a theory that there has to be a primary source for all of those high priced dealer bones. I think one or two entities probably supply the vast majority of fossils from the Morrison Formation which seems the primary formation for North America fossils out there. I think I was successful in the attempt to find one of the sources of the fossils. I have seen affordable Jurassic fossils for the first time and I would tend to trust the ID's because these folks dug them up. I suspect season collectors will the know the folks I am talking about. I saw a few fossils that were in the price range that we set for ourselves. It is not a lot of money at all but I saw fossils that we CAN get. We can not buy right now. The Judith River Anky and I are in a firmly committed relationship so until that tooth comes home, I am frozen on purchasing for a bit lol I do have a source though and time to start learning about Jurassic dinosaur fossils before I buy any. I know the general profile of what type of dinosaur fossil we will add. It will be a bone, not a tooth, of a sauropod. It will give us a Jurassic dinosaur to fill that blank space in the program plus it would give us some visual flair. Point is...... a little bit of above ground virtual digging can unearth the fossils you want even if they at first seem to expensive to afford. Be patient, be diligent, do your homework, and you can build a pretty awesome dinosaur collection, with out going broke

Any thoughts in this? Sandstone bolder found in Northern NJ (Newark Supergroup). About 7 inches long. Concave. I think one of the smaller ones was a cast but I'd have to go back and check. Thanks! Dwight

Hello forumites Can’t seem to find an id on this ammo. I guess I might need to prep more to see the keel but it’s pretty fragile. Could Paraloid it I guess. Lower Oxford Clay Callovian, Jurassic Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, UK. Cube is 1cm3 @Ludwigia

After the Hybodontids, our program starts to transition toward the modern sharks. We introduce lamniform sharks and the cow sharks. We will not be able to spend much time at all on the Cow and Crow Sharks. They only get a brief introduction and a look at the teeth. Squalicorax is an important species for us even though we do not spend a lot of time on it. The students in first few classes we do presentations for will be going home with Squalicorax teeth from Morocco. We would like to spend more time on the Cow sharks eventually but we only have one tooth to show them and we will have to edit content to free up space for them but I will work on that down the road. The primary focus in this section is Scapanorhynchus. The first shark art Carter did was a Goblin and we do give them a lot of time in the presentaton. They look cool and have been around for a long time. We present the kids with a nice assortment of teeth and some cool science. The teeth were important adaptations for catching fish and the snout had the ampullae of Lorenzini for sensing changes in the electro magnetic fields around them. We compare this to the modern hammerhead which we do not cover in the program but gives the kids a sense of how the adaptations of hammerheads work. We also talk about fin structure and being able to tell they were slow swimmers. The extend-o-matic jaw is another adaptation we cover with this species. I am happy with the fossil representations for now though I really want to add more Cow Shark fossils at some point and Anomotodon would also be a good addition. The fossils for the presentation.. Pic 1 Hexanchus andersoni from STH. I know H. andersoni should chronologically fit later but Cow Sharks fit here and this is the only one we have for now. Pic 2- Squalicorax pristodontus from Morocco. This is our largest Squalicorax tooth. The kids will get these teeth to take home so while we do not spend a lot of time on them, the teeth are very important to the program. Pic 3- Scapnorhynchus texanus and Scapanorhynchus puercoensis. Our nice little Goblin Shark display with some of our best teeth. Two of the texanus teeth are over 1.5 inches and the puercoenisis teeth are uncommon I believe and pretty super cool.

Back in November of last year, my son and I decided to start our own education non-profit. We wanted to combine his artwork, my teaching skills, and real fossils to create a museum on wheels that takes fun field trips to the classrooms. We had shark teeth and marine mammal fossils so we started building education programs around those. I am very satisfied where those two programs are at though I would love to expand the number of shark species we can present but that is a story for a different day. We knew we would need to get a dinosaur program going at some point but I know nothing about dinosaur fossils so I did not want to start collecting yet. My plan was to wait until late spring or early summer to start building our collection. A friend gave us two hadrosaur teeth and a Hypselosaurus egg shell piece in December so our program got started earlier than planned. As we do with every decision, my son and I talked about picking up a few bargain dinosaur fossils while we tightened up the other programs which are debuting in March. One of the first things I did was join TFF. I was very intimidated by dinosaur fossils and I hoped this place would help me educate myself. I have been a quiet observer so far and have not engaged very much with the dinosaur experts here. I have read a lot of posts and this has been so incredibly helpful. Utilizing the expertise of the members here has also saved me money and stopped me from making one unwise purchase. I have only picked up a few dinosaur items up to this point but without being on this site, I doubt I would have made any attempt at starting this particular collection so soon. I am very grateful for the forum and its members because a lot of people really want to help. I quickly learned that our presentation will be centered on the Hell Creek fauna and we can augment it with some African dinosaurs. After a bit of window shopping, it became apparent right away that Jurassic period dinosaurs were simply too expensive for us. There is no way we will be able to purchase any and trades are unlikely as we just do not have much material that would have much trade value. I can live with this though. If we focus on the T-rex/Ceratopsian fauna of Hell Creek we are giving kids species they know plus introducing them to new species which I am totally cool with. We also decided we could talk Triassic dinosaurs with kids using Bull Canyon fossils. Now I am an avid reader here so I am aware that there is some debate about the species that are found in Bull Canyon and how things are labeled by dealers but I did pick some up because we want to teach kids about the evolution of dinosaurs and to give them a few species that have never heard of. I can not be sure if the teeth I have are Coelophysis teeth but we are still going to present them as such to the students because it is an opportunity to get to early dinosaurs. Same goes for a "prosauropod" tooth we purchased. We are not going to sell the fossils so the correct ID is less important to us than being able to at least have a representation of early dinosaurs for the kiddos. Our early efforts were given a huge boost when a member here helped broker a transaction between another member which resulted in us having a very nice partial T-rex and a Nano. This was huge for us. We got the centerpiece species and it was super affordable. I am still in a bit of shock to be honest and incredibly grateful. We also picked up some inexpensive Hell Creek Triceratops teeth. I found a nice Saurornitholestes from Judith River which gives us a "raptor" fossil for the kids. I got an inexpensive Moroccan sauropod tooth which gives us a "long neck" that we can use. It is really not a bad start in my eyes. We picked some species that we really wanted to include. We also have begun to find some teeth that kids can handle in the form of partial or shed Ceratopsian teeth and inexpensive Spinosaurus teeth from Morocco. I only made one questionable decision. I did not use TFF and ended up misidentifying a tooth. This led us to having two Richardoesstesia gilmorei teeth. We really did not need two fossils from this species but it was a learning experience. I learned that I need keep studying, learning and using the forum. Had I put it here first, instead of testing my own skills, I would not have picked it up . I would have filled another need in the program. Lesson learned and the upside is that I do have a dinosaur fossil I can possibly trade. It is not much for trade I am sure, but maybe I can use it to get a fossil that fills a hole in the program. The most important thing I have learned so far is that I really enjoy collecting dinosaur fossils. I am hooked. I was never a dinosaur kid myself. I preferred sharks and whales but I am really captivated by dinosaurs now. I have been cramming my brain with scientific information about dinosaurs and my son is really enjoying getting a start on his dino artwork. We have a long way to go before we are ready to unleash our budding dino education program. I have a long way to go with my own knowledge too. I do know it will be a lot of fun to learn and I am looking forward to getting more interactive with the dinosaur collectors here. We have settled on the next round of dinosaurs to add (Acheroraptor, Ankylosaur, Pachycephalosaurus, a Troodontid, plus more Ceratopsian material) and they seem attainable so I am excited to get to work on those in the near future. I also learned there are species from the Hell Creek formation that are awesome but we will never have due to price or rarity lol Dakotaraptor is #1 on that list but the avian dinosaurs are not far behind. All things considered, I am super happy with our tiny dinosaur collection and I am really enjoying the hunt for more !!

Tonight, I started a block that iv had for quite some time, and being dying to prep. Annoyingly, the split from the nodule was very poor, cause a few different cracks, all the way through the ammonite. I glued this back up two days ago and let it set before starting prep. I couldn’t wait to get home from work today, so I could begin the real work. Prep photos to follow in the comments as I can’t size down these files any more

Yesterday Natalie and me went on a windy fieldtrip to the coast of the north of France, this time searching for jurassic ( Titionian ) fossils. Although this site is less productive than the late cretaceous sites in the area we always manage to find some iteresting things. Most of the comon fossils here are bivalve "steinkerns" but from time to time we find ammonites and bone fragments of marine reptiles. the first decent find was a rib fragment of marine reptile, the piece was well embedded in the matrix and very brittel, I managed to get it out, but in a lot of fragments. This wil be a puzzle to put back together once the pieces are dry. Halfway the clay cliffs Natalie found a huge ammonite between the boulders. we removed as much matrix as possible and helped with a fragment of fishnet from the beach we dragged the fossil back to the car

Ok so have recently arrived back from Morocco a good friend over there said he would meet up with me in goulmima and which we spent a good number of days breaking open rocks finding ammonites fish remains gastropods reptiles all good stuff and was beautiful camping out there, but I am shifting topic here. I made a contact last time regarding jurassic fossil remains so this time I divulged from the usual kem kem beds (however ended up digging them in a lesser known location close to goulmima) when I arrived there a ton of jurassic bones where present some easily identifiable as sauropod vertebrae, femur ( yes absolutely massive) digit 1 claw but two vertebrae I purchased where not associated with any of the other finds and I am needing a little help. The first one and pictures attached in this section are one I am currently prepping the process section is elongated after the neural spine canal and is approximately 1.3 times the size of the Centrum with one side being slightly concave and the other being flat. Again it might be hard to see the bone as this is being prepped now currently but to my eyes has similarities to a stegosaurus vertebrae. This vert I believe to be dorsal is 10.5 inches tall the centrum at it's largest point is 4.2 inches wide and the depth would be 4

Hello, If you have seen my prior posts, it would appear I'm on a lucky streak... I found the blade of this sharks tooth at the fleet, Weymouth It is from the middle Oxford Clay (Upper callovian) - specifically the Q. Lamberti/ C. scarburgense subzone bondary I believe it is Sphenodus longidens, though it is hard to tell without the root! Any help or thoughts would be much appreciated Cheers, Jacob.