What types of fossils, have little public awareness?

[Denis Arcand]

On 6/18/2022 at 12:51 AM, PRLE said:

 

 

Nice collection, thanks for showing 

[Plax]

Sponges. And yes they can be identified by their shape. 

[Yoda]

Stromatolites

 

Whenever I tell people I collect them, the response is usually :

”it’s fossilised what ?!?!?!?!” 

[Wrangellian]

18 hours ago, Yoda said:

Stromatolites

Whenever I tell people I collect them, the response is usually :

”it’s fossilised what ?!?!?!?!” 

Still better than having to explain what coprolites are, but Lori might have more to say about that.

[joaoarguello3]

Undoubtedly, the Ediacaran biota is little known but practically absent from the public consciousness. They are simple but very enigmatic organisms and certainly little known or studied. I could say that the Cambrian ones are little known but they really have more popularity than the Ediacaran ones, especially because of the subject of the Burgess Shale or Stephen Jay Gould's book.

[Mr Galasphere]

Microfossils!

I love them, but I don't think the general public has much awareness.

[Bringing Fossils to Life]

I know that they have been seen by the public eye, and that they were predators, but I LOVE ORTHOCERIDS! They need much more research (e.g. someone needs to clean out the 180 species of Michelinoceras, a personal favorite) and need to be more accurately portrayed (though they are beginning to more so).

[Neanderthal Shaman]

On 6/23/2022 at 9:08 AM, joaoarguello3 said:

Undoubtedly, the Ediacaran biota is little known but practically absent from the public consciousness. They are simple but very enigmatic organisms and certainly little known or studied. I could say that the Cambrian ones are little known but they really have more popularity than the Ediacaran ones, especially because of the subject of the Burgess Shale or Stephen Jay Gould's book.

 

 

 

 

I second this! 

 

 

 

Eurypterids! Not as obscure as some other things in this thread, but still underrated! 

The Steve Irwin of time travel, Nigel Marvin, wrestled with a megalograptus in the "Sea Monsters" TV special, and that really captured my imagination as a 9-year-old dinosaur nerd. 

[PaleoNoel]

Some of the most neglected or under appreciated fossils in the public eye are trace fossils, which are a broad and wide ranging category that add so much to our understanding of ancient environments. Especially when it comes to the record of insects outside of Lagerstatte deposits, fossils like this Celliforma provide a window into what was buzzing around certain famous vertebrate bearing formations like the White River. 

Celliforma is the ichnogenus given to the burrow endocasts of wasps and bees. Their record extends back to the Triassic, but this specimen is from Wyoming, found in 2020 in the above mentioned White River formation.

https://ichnology.ku.edu/invertebrate_traces/tfimages/celliforma.html