Texas Ammonite Hunting in Spring Creek

[smt126]

For Spring break we headed down to Texas for a vacation. My daughter has a love of ammonites and prehistoric marine reptiles, so I thought Texas would be a great place to hunt some fossils as well as do some general vacationing. We spent our first 5 days in Sherman as it seemed most centrally located to many of the hunting locales we wanted to do as well as not far from Dallas. I'm glad we stayed there versus Dallas as I had originally planned as the traffic was a lot less on the days we weren't traveling through the Dallas area. The first day we went, we headed to NSR and in the first 10 minutes my wife and one of my kids were knee deep stuck in mud, and the wife said no more NSR for that trip, so we gave up on the marine reptiles and went for the ammonites the next day.

 

I had messaged @BobWill some time ago and again right before our trip as I had seen his posts before about ammonites. We headed over to his place before going out hunting, and he had a wide range of fossils he showed me and my family. He and his wife were very nice people, and spending the day with them was the best day of the trip in my opinion. I can't thank Bob enough for making our dream of finding our own ammonites a reality. We also went to Jacksboro later in the day, but that post will have to wait until another day when I have more time to take pictures of the fossils we collected there. We got to the site with Bob, and it was literally less than 100 feet to the creek. There were quite a few pieces of ammonites, as well as plenty in the matrix in the creek. We spent less than an hour there and came out with a half dozen intact good sized ammonites. I will need to clean more of the matrix off of most of them at some point, but just don't have the time right now for that. Please use caulk tube as reference for size lol. One of these days I will try to get something nicer for size references.

[Fruitbat]

Looks like somebody had fun!  Thanks for posting!

 

-Joe

[minnbuckeye]

Great finds!! Is that a large ammonite at the base of your child's foot in the group picture ?? There are so many gracious members on this forum that help people like you and me enjoy fossil hunting outside of our local area. excellent job BobWill.

 

Mike

[digit]

Looks like great fun--thanks for posting. Both Texas and ammonites are on our fossil bucket list (as soon as we can find time).

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[smt126]

4 hours ago, minnbuckeye said:

Great finds!! Is that a large ammonite at the base of your child's foot in the group picture ?? There are so many gracious members on this forum that help people like you and me enjoy fossil hunting outside of our local area. excellent job BobWill.

 

Mike

 

Hey mike,

 

The members on here are definitely great. That is an ammonite by his foot. They were literally everywhere. 

[ynot]

Congratulations on finding the "first" ammonites!

Nice trip report and finds.

Tony

[digit]

1 hour ago, smt126 said:

They were literally everywhere. 

 

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Darktooth]

Glad you and your family had fun! Great report and pics! Kudos to Bobwill!

[JustPlainPetrified]

Fun time for everyone and great results. Congratulations!

[smt126]

3 hours ago, digit said:

 

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

Hopefully you make it over there some day. I must say it along with jacksboro made it seem like the fossils were jumping out at us. I did spend about 20 minutes trying to get a nice one out that my kids wanted. Bob and I took turns and unfortunately it broke in a few pieces so I decided to leave it as we probably would lose some pieces of the course of the trip. 

[Ludwigia]

Nice to see the happy hunters at work and leisure. What a wonderful first time experience for you all. Thanks to Bob and his wife.

[Peat Burns]

Wow.  Those are some monsters!

Congrats.