Do You Have A Fossil That "got Away"?

[aplomado]

Lost? Just missed finding? Kicking yourself for underbidding on an auction?

Here's my tale of woe:

This mammoth tooth I bought apparently "vanished" in the mail...

I did get a refund, but that's not much consolation.

Edited February 26, 2015 by aplomado

[Uncle Siphuncle]

I had 4 unprepped Zanthopsis dufouri crabs from Spain disappear in Customs in New York. The seller says he'll replace them once he can collect more, but for now I'm $300 or so bucks out of pocket. Kinda makes me want to do deals in person.

[Ludwigia]

Well, it didn't get away of its own, but I'm still kicking myself about this one.

http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/15562-the-one-i-left-behind/?hl=%2Bthe+%2Bone+%2Bleft+%2Bbehind

[erose]

two:

When my daughter was little, maybe 3-4 years old, she loved to sit near me while I sorted and identified fossils. She picked up a perfect pea-sized enrolled Flexicalymene and then dropped it! I swear a black hole opened up and swallowed it. I moved every piece of furniture in that room and inspected every last nook and cranny. It never was found.

The second was a one of a kind spiraled Platyceras from the Lower Devonian of New York. It just disappeared from my collection. I've gone back thru my stuff numerous times and can not locate it. Not a clue where it went.

These stand out but there have been numerous specimens that disintegrated in the field right before my eyes. Either they refused to be chiseled out or were just beyond their prime, either way they didn't make it home.

[willy]

I think you will get all that goes missing back when you die. Some will have bigger piles than others.

[Wrangellian]

I have two main ones also:

I bought a couple items from a guy in Tennessee on ebay, a phyllocarid and a supposed 'jellyfish' that was intriguing, from the Price Fm of Virginia. Paid good money, they never arrived. There was a lot of back and forth but I never got a refund or replacement. Should have gotten tracking but I could hardly afford the fossils themselves so I cheaped out. I see he is back selling more, If anyone is curious there is another 'jellyfish' (or whatever it really is) similar to the one I paid for, up there right now. A smaller one and a larger one.

The other is my oft-repeated story of finding a chunk with one surface covered with small echinoids with spines (mass burial), in our local Cretaceous sandstone. Instead of putting the effort into excavating the block whole, we proceeded to pick off individual echinoids, and not even all of them, just the ones we could get loose. We were pretty green and didn't realize what we were doing, but I am still kicking myself for it.

Edited February 26, 2015 by Wrangellian

[FossilDAWG]

Once when I was collecting at Arkona, Ontario I found a decent sized intact arthrodire plate in the middle of a large (over 3 meters [10 feet] across) slab of limestone. After an hour of trying to chisel around the plate, which resulted in a "moat" all of 3-4 mm deep in the hard-as-granite limestone, I realize that not only was I never going to get it out with a hammer and chisel, I had also squandered a large chunk of the time I had to collect that day. That sucked, as I only get to Arkona once every 3 or 4 years if I am lucky.

Don

[PA Fossil Finder]

I recently visited the famous "Red Hill" fossil locality near Hyner, PA, with a group of about twenty-five other people. The weathered red shale on the outside of the roadcut is infamous for crumbling into tiny bits, fossils and all. I found several nice fish teeth and scales on the surface, but they fell apart practically before I even tried to get them!

Thankfully, I found lots of other good stuff that day.