Hi everyone! I’m not a collector or even a hobbiest (yet!) but I came across this forum looking for a way to start learning and to help me ID some interesting things I found the other day. I was walking with my dog in Cranberry Township PA (20miles north of Pittsburgh) and noticed a number of darker, reddish, oddly shaped stones that stood out against the hillside of crumbled gray shale that had been pulled out (possibly from as far as 50 feet down or so) in digging a drainage pit for a new development. Most of what I saw just looked like concretions formed around river stones or something like that (some were split in half so they almost resembled clams) but in one area there were pieces that looked different, some with fairly conspicuous tooth or bonelike shapes. I rinsed mud off of them with warm water and started scrubbing a bit with a brush but I noticed that the lightest areas on a couple pieces are fairly soft (I can scrape them with my fingernail) so I thought I'd better stop until I figured out what was what.
I don’t really know anything about this stuff yet, but I loved looking for ferns, etc and even found a trilobyte once as a kid and so I was kinda thrilled to have maybe found something interesting. Of course, they could just be a pile of neat rocks too, haha... So what do you think I have here? Just organic looking concretions or something cooler? Thanks!
(note: I embedded the images instead of directly attaching them, so if you click on them you'll be able to see higher-resolution versions)