Where do you guys get all your fossils? How far did you travel?

[minnbuckeye]

As is usually mentioned in a situation like this: Join a fossil club! Locals from your area can chime in on what is available. I have been hooked for about 3 years and started with a fossil club. In fact I just returned from a trip with them yesterday collecting Devonian material in Iowa.  Anyways, not only do you get to visit known fossil containing areas, but more importantly, members are usually there to help educate newcomers. For instance, as I mentioned, our group was out to find trilobites, but after busting rock for 5 hours, I asked a few members to direct me to an area known to have Pennsylvanian flora. Their knowledge allowed me to expand my horizons and be successful immediately. Since no one in the group has an interest in what this zone has to offer, I have it all to myself. By using their expertise, you will quickly develop the skills needed to venture out into the unknown and be successful. Good luck!

 

Another thought that came to mind: Just because you  find a certain fossil (shark's teeth) all of the time, do not think it is too lowly to offer as a trade. There are MANY areas of the world where local collectors have no chance at finding a tooth. They may be very happy trading for what is run of the mill for you. I do think once you understand what is available locally, you probably will enjoy the "find" better than the trade.

[Uncle Siphuncle]

I've been collecting 14 years at this point, and I'm still a generalist.  Targeting variety tends to satisfy my wanderlust, so big mileage is part of my gig.  I've covered over 300,000 miles at this point and logged over 850 producing sites.  

 

This past weekend, for instance, included 2 separate day trips, the Saturday trip keeping me awake for 24 hours, thanks to coffee and 5 Hour Energy.  I only slept 2 hours Friday night and 5 hours Saturday night, and probably covered 1000 miles on the road, but the adventure was well worth it, and I got to scratch a couple itches.

 

I explore constantly, usually piggybacking proven sites onto wildcard sites to round out a trip.  I spend most of my time collecting in Texas, but tend to do one fossil vacation out state per year, striving to include family, plus opportunistic trips when traveling to see extended family around the country.  I've collected Germany twice and France once as well.  I've perused every period of the Paleozoic and Mesozoic at this point, as well as each epoch of the Cenozoic, in some cases both marine and terrestrial.  

 

I still have aspirations of breaking new ground, seeing new formations, collecting new-to-me species, and collecting upgrade specimens, and that keeps me from getting bored.  Quiet times in the field are my go-to therapy for escaping the news, politics, social media etc. while working out solutions in my head to life's challenges through long, uninterrupted blocks of time for introspective thought.  The long drives help with all of the above as well.

[EMP]

3 hours ago, Plax said:

am guessing you must be in the crystalline belt of Maryland? Can't think of anywhere else in Maryland that would be poor in fossils. Had the same situation growing up in SE PA. I agree with your observations and recommendations to Fossilien.

 

No, the formations themselves just aren't productive. You have a few good spots like the Cliffs or Henson's Creek, but those really get hit hard especially in tourist season and I always end up with nothing more then a few small teeth (I did find a broken meg one time, many moons ago).

 

For the most part my collecting is limited to road cuts, which are pretty hit and miss because most of the ones in the area are small scree piles along backroads. Sometimes they produce a lot the first couple of visits, but then they get worn out and I'm stuck having to wait a while for them to "regenerate" and expose some fresh material. Another problem is all the development that's going on (I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that!). MD's pretty small, and right now we're going through a lot of neighborhood expansion out in places like Hagerstown, Middletown, Charles County and Frederick County that are covering up lots of the old exposures. There used to be a lot of old iron mining pits between DC and Baltimore that were well known for their dinosaur teeth and bones. I always wanted to visit them, but after more searching found that the last of them was obliterated in the 1990s to become a housing project. There's always local creeks, but for the most part they're small, on private or park land, and not to mention filthy. Urban pollution has contaminated most of them and made it not entirely safe to wade into them unless you want to risk an E Coli infection or some other God awful infection.