Search the Community

Hey guys hope you're well! I wanted to show you the amazing lovenia woodsii clusters I found today at Beaumaris, and ask for some advice. These are lovenia woodsii. Some still retain amazing detail, like the final pic! Do you guys have any recommendations for coating the sandy matrix the woodsii are sitting in? I would like to prevent them becoming too brittle upon drying out.

Hey everyone! I was wondering if you could please help me identify these items and whether they are worth keeping! I found these three today at Beaumaris. The first one (pictures 1 + 2) appears to be some odd, fortuitous weathering of sandstone? In the second (picture 2) it seems that there may be some possible gastropod remains in there? The third item - the baguette! (pictures 3 + 4) It caught my interest due to the ridges on the top and flat base. I assume it's likely an sandstone concretion? It feels like rock on the outside and isn't as heavy as ironstone. Thanks in advance for any help!

Hello everyone! I went for my first fossicking adventure at Beaumaris, Victoria late last week. I was hoping you guys could please help me ID a shark tooth (Image 1) and some other items that I cannot identify (Images 2+3). The dark, cylindrical items in Images 2+3 are hollow inside, which you can see in Image 3. All were found underwater in Beaumaris, Victoria just off the jetty.

Thought Id as for help, recently found on the beach in gipsland, Victoria, Australia. Not sure if its a tooth or claw, area it was found in is well known for fossil finds. Thanks in advance for any help. Daniel

G'day Everyone! Yesterday my dad and I were lucky to visit Batesford Quarry in Geelong, Victoria. The fossils here are miocene in age from the Batesford Limestone. Fossils foudn here consist of sharks teeth, cetacean fossils, rare bird and terrestial mammal material and invertebrate fossils, mainily echinoderms. Batesford Quarry is one of the places my dad and I have been wanting to go to for many years due to it's high concentration of vertebrate fossils compared to other Victorian fossil sites (Mostly Shark Teeth). We arrived at the Quarry around 8:30 AM and spent the next 6 hours searching the spoil piles for sharks teeth. Due to the heavy rain the past few days, the sharks teeth were harder to find as the sand was wet and hard to seive and see the elsuive teeth. However my dad and I came home with a good haul, collecting a total of 28 sharks teeth, a nice fish tooth plate and numerous invertebrate fossils. I am not the best at IDing shark teeth so any help will be greatly appreciated Thanks for reading! The Shark Teeth Haul Grey Nurse Shark? (Carcharias taurus) Isurus? Rare Galeocerdo Dan

Hi guys I recently found these boomerang shaped teeth/shells at one of the beaches at Wilson’s promontory, Victoria. Could someone help me to identify what it is? Thank you!

Opal-Filled Fossils Reveal Timid, Dog-Size Dinosaur That Lived Down Under By Laura Geggel, January 17, 2019 https://www.livescience.com/64522-opal-dinosaur-fossils-in-australia.html https://www.sciencealert.com/a-gorgeous-opalised-fossil-turned-out-to-be-an-unknown-species-of-dinosaur Bell, P.R., Herne, M.C., Brougham, T. and Smith, E.T., 2018. Ornithopod diversity in the Griman Creek Formation (Cenomanian), New South Wales, Australia. PeerJ, 6, p.e6008. https://peerj.com/articles/6008/ Yours, Paul H.

As the year comes to a close i decided to do a bit more collecting at one of my favourite Australian sites: Beaumaris near Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. Once again i travelled down and stayed at a motel near the beach for three days (27/12/18 through to 29/12/18). This trip is a sequel to the previous two trips i have made here which are also posted on the forum: Jan 2016 trip: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/61248-fossil-hunting-holiday-in-victoria-australia-dec-2015-jan-2016/ Feb 2017 trip: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/71996-fossil-hunting-holiday-at-beaumaris-australia-feb-2017/ Beaumaris is a significant site with both marine and terrestrial fossils from the latest Miocene aged Beaumaris Sandstone Formation (5 - 6 million years old), which crops out in distinctly red-coloured coastal cliffs and also in offshore rocky reefs. An impressive diversity of both vertebrate and invertebrate fauna occurs here, and the Melbourne Museum has put together a neat PDF of the fossil diversity for those unfamiliar with the site (https://www.bcs.asn.au/fossils_of_beaumaris_2015-02.pdf). My plan was to collect every single low tide across these three days, and sleep during every high tide. Yes, this meant going out collecting in the middle of the night too! My main interest was to collect shark teeth, however they can be tough to find here and are certainly not as common as at many other sites internationally that the people on this forum would be more familiar with. This often seems to be the case with Australian vertebrate fossils. It does however make it quite rewarding when you do eventually find them! The first day of searching (27/12/18) proved to be rather disappointing. I finally got to try snorkelling for fossils, which is a popular method here for finding things exposed along the seabed, but alas after about 3 hours in the water i had not found any bones or teeth. I was unable to locate the nodule bed where most of the vertebrate fossils originate from, which i think played a part in my lack of success. The seabed was also quite sanded over and it was hard to see much. I was definitely out of my element here, but it was also a lot of fun to get close to some of the local marine life, including stingrays! I decided to return to land collecting after not doing very well in the water and when i did so my luck changed greatly. The next two days and nights of land collecting (28/12/18 and 29/12/18) proved to be much more successful and i even got to meet two TFF members on the beach (coincidentally)! @Echinoid and @Tympanic bulla were also out looking, and we had a nice chat before they headed off to continue snorkelling. I then spent most of my remaining time on the beach flipping rocks and examining the pebbles up close, ultimately finishing the trip with a total of five shark teeth which i was very happy with! Carcharodon hastalis tooth as found. 24mm long. Large Carcharodon hastalis upper anterior tooth, as found at 2 am (with a head-torch) on 29/12/18. Measures 56 mm long. I had long been waiting for a tooth of this size! Carcharodon hastalis posterior tooth as found. 15 mm long. Another Carcharodon hastalis posterior as found. 13 mm long. And a small fragment of cetacean bone. Worn pieces like this are the most common vertebrate fossils at Beaumaris. Pictures continued in the next post

This specimen was found from beaumaris beach, victoria. Is it a fossil bone fragment? More pictures to come. It will only let me post one for some reason :/

Im going to Victoria on Friday for a week and visiting various locations including: Wangaratta Bendigo Ballarat Warnambool Apollo bay pt phillip bay (beaumaris) So my question is are there any good fossil sites around these areas that i could find some ancient treasures in? Thanks.

9

Was digging around in some boxes and found this specimen... it has a decent number of species on it! Although its nothing compared to another plate found at the site by some friends. We were going to split it but decided not to. Ended up having a couple hundred individual graptolites inside... but anyway! Sorry about the horrible pic as per usual. Early Ordovician (Bendigonian Stage) Bendigonian Formation, near Bendigo, VIC Australia.

Hello, I was strolling my local beach this morning & was pleasantly surprised to see this little guy sitting at the shoreline. I live in Chelsea, Melbourne, Victoria. Was wondering what kind of shark it’s from, and roughly how old the fossil may be? Thank you in advance!

Hello, Last weekend I went back to Fossil Beach with my dad. Fossil Beach is located in Mornington, Victoria, which is approx 70km south of Melbourne. The location is part of the Fyansford Formation which is middle Miocene (10-15 miilion years old). I hadn't been here for a couple of months and was actually planning to go to another location in Bendigo (central Victoria), but we slept in and went here as a "fall back" location Anyway, what a day! There had been a lot of quite heavy rain in the previous weeks and there were so many fossils that had washed out of the exposed clay and onto the beach ...we were just picking them up among the rocks. It was quite warm inland, but at the beach the ocean was covered in thick fog which dropped the temperature right down ...luckily no wind. There were a couple of other group there also. Regards, Daniel Micantapex rhomboidalis Conus sp Gastropods ?? Left: Gastropod ?? Middle: Cowries ....found 5 cowries in a cluster when i lifted a lump of clay. Right: Have never seen these before at Fossil Beach.....any suggestions?? Scaphopods Various bivalves. The far right, bottom row, was a fully intact one with both top and bottom halves joined!! Top Row: Biplex maccoyi Middle Row: ?? Bottom Row: Various corals Columbarium sp.

Hi, found today on the Fossil beach in Victoria, Australia, fossil tooth and a rock with imprint. Tooth size is around 2 cm. Whose tooth could it be? And is it imprint of fish fin or some plant in the rock?Thanks

Hi. I'm very new and have never done this before however i have taken an interest in fossicking. As i live in Melbourne Australia, I plan to visit the Batesford limestone quarry to look for some shark teeth. I wonder if anyone can guide me about what i need, if any license is needed, specific area i need to go to, if it is open for public and other stuff that i may need to know. I know a lot of people here have done fossicking here but i can't seem to find any details on the stuff i mentioned above. Thank you so much and hope to hear from you guys soon!

Common coral collected from Fossil Beach, Mornington, Victoria.

Common coral collected from Fossil Beach, Mornington, Victoria.

Hello. I am quite new to fossil hunting and would like some help. I am going down to Beaumaris next week to go for a fossick. (The fossils you can find there are from the Late Miocene to Early Pliocene) Can anyone give me some tips on how to look for fossils effectively and what I should be looking for? Thanks, Daniel

Hello, I found the following specimen at Beaumaris today. It has a bone like shape ....looks like the end of a long bone, but it's hollow. Can anyone assist with an identification. Thanks, Daniel

This bone fragment was collected on the beach at Beaumaris in Victoria, Australia. The site is latest Miocene to earliest Pliocene in age (5 - 6 million years old) and consists of the Beaumaris Sandstone formation. Fossils of bony fish, sharks, whales, dolphins, seals, penguins, flying birds and terrestrial marsupials are all known from the location. This PDF gives a great overview of the Beaumaris fauna for those that are unfamiliar with it: http://www.marinecare.org.au/images/Fossils_of_Beaumaris_Feb_2015.pdf I am thinking possibly some kind of jaw fragment just based on the shape, but from what i am not sure. The best match i can see in the document above is the base of the Albatross beak on page 13, but i am not holding my breath on that one. There is dark coloured bone along the edges on both side faces, separated by sediment in the middle. The sediment gap between the bone is larger on one side than the other. The whole piece measures 30mm long, stands almost 20mm tall and is 20mm wide at the widest end. Any ideas?

This shark tooth was found on the foreshore at Beaumaris in Victoria, Australia. It is 5-6 million years old. I am confident it is a mako shark tooth but i am trying to decide which species to label it. The following shark taxa are listed in the fauna found at this location: Heterodontus cainozoicus, Carcharias taurus, Carcharodon megalodon, Parotodus benedeni, Isurus desori, Isurus oxyrinchus, Isurus hastalis, Isurus retroflexus, Lamna?, Megascyliorhinus sp., Carcharhinus cf. brachyurus, Carcharhinus sp., Galeocerdo aduncus The majority of teeth at the site are from Carcharodon hastalis (or Isurus hastalis depending on who you believe). However i feel like my tooth is too narrow to be a C. hastalis tooth. Even the first lower anteriors of C. hastalis that i have seen are somewhat proportionally wider than my example, hence why i am leaning towards one of the other species of mako but i want to know what the shark tooth experts on this forum think. I had a look in the book 'Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia' (which has a nice section on fossil chondrichthyans) and the closest match i could see was a first lower anterior tooth from Isurus paucus (tooth A on page 552 if anyone has the book) but this species isn't listed in the fauna for Beaumaris. Might it instead be an Isurus oxyrinchus or desori tooth? Additionally my tooth is fairly straight, and most of the other mako specimens i am seeing are more curved. It measures 24 mm long and 11 mm wide.

G'day all! I have just returned from a three day collecting trip to Beaumaris, a coastal suburb of Melbourne in Australia. This report acts as a pictorial overview of the trip and provides an insight into what collecting at this beach location is like. A similar trip was undertaken by@digit late last year (http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/70070-quick-trip-to-beaumaris-cliffs-australia/). I too had previously spent two days at this location in early 2016, during my first Victorian fossil hunting trip. Pictures of the finds from that trip can be found in this thread: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/61248-fossil-hunting-holiday-in-victoria-australia-dec-2015-jan-2016/ I decided to return to Beaumaris for a second time as i haven't been collecting for quite some time and i wanted to find more vertebrate material from this location, as i knew the potential that the site possesses and didn't manage to do it enough justice on my first trip here. All of these finds were collected on the shore across the three days that i spent here from the 14th through to the 16th of February. I spent most of that time rummaging on hands and knees in the beach shingle near the Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron. As mentioned my main goal was to collect vertebrate material and i was especially interested in finding shark teeth. The fossils come from the Beaumaris Sandstone formation and are between 5 and 6 million years old (latest Miocene or earliest Pliocene). Most of the vertebrate material is derived from a phosphatic nodule bed at the base of this formation, just above the unit contact with the underlying Gellibrand Marl. This nodule bed outcrops only at the very base of the cliffs and on the shore platform which is normally covered by the sea except at low tide. Because i was collecting loose material from the beach shingle a lot of the bones and teeth are heavily worn and fragmentary, but they are still very cool! Beaumaris is highly significant as it is one of the only places in Australia where you get fossils of both marine and terrestrial animals from this period of time, capturing a snapshot of almost the entire ecosystem from fish, birds and mammals to corals, gastropods, echinoids and many others. It is also one of the only places where you can collect vertebrate fossils so close to a major Australian city (only about 30 minutes drive from the centre of Melbourne). The Location: Fossil bones in-situ and in my hand (these are most likely from whales): Many more pictures still to come!