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I have a quick question for those that have bought and gone through their micro matrix from the Aurora Fossil Museum. Did you wash it before going through it, or wash it after you've found your fossils? I got the pack with the mini screen for sifting, but I'm a little afraid to wash it all first and risk losing tiny teeth. How did you all go about doing yours, or what do you think the best way would be?

Haven't had time to post here lately, but I carved out a slot so here we go. In April of last year (2019), I had a chance to visit China. When I was in Beijing, one of my goals was to see the feathered dinos. I visited two museums that had them. One was the Geological Museum of China. The other (The Beijing Museum of Natural History) will be the subject of another post. I took hundreds of pictures there, but I can't post them all here. I have selected some of the better ones, focusing on the feathered critters. You'll have to excuse the lighting and quality of some of them. The light was low in parts of the museum and I had to shoot through glass most of the time. An Iphone was my camera and I've had to shrink them to fit on here. It was a great museum and they had so much to see besides the fossils. This greets you when you walk in along with some other fossils and minerals. The verts are from a Shantungosaurus giganteus Hu, (a hadrosaurid) found in Shandong Province in 1973.The other guy is a Lufengosaurus magnus (Young). Don't know the rest of the details other than 1957 year. Representing The Fossil Forum with my t-shirt. First up is Caudipteryx zoui Ji et al, Early Cretaceous, Beipiao, Liaoning Province. Next is Enantionithes gen et sp indet, Early Cretaceous, Lingyuan, Liaoning. Liaoxiornis delicatus Hou et Chen, Early Cretaceous, Lingyuan, Liaoning. Next are several specimens of Confusiosornis sanctus Hou et al, Early Cretaceous, Beipiao, Liaoning. The darker shaded area is the shadow of my phone, sorry. continued....

Whew. Last one with identifying marks to identify. Is a museum cast. UNSM 4616 Sure, I could email the collections curator at Morril Hall, but I’m afraid to wear out my welcome. As of yet have been unable to find data on this one on my own. Figure I’ll give yinze a crack at it before I bother the museum for the twentieth time. My research shows this to be a camel of some sort. It is likely Nebraska or South Dakota in origin for the original due to the provenance of the other casts yinze have seen me dealing with the last few weeks. This is a pretty poor cast with lots of missing parts broken off from poor storage. In fact, it is so bad I’m considering doing a full on arty reconstruction as it is not suitable for display or education in its current form. Due to the pigmented plaster, it does not photograph well. Cannot find a single reference to this number online. ( doesn’t help there’s a wristwatch and a snake fossil with similar ID numbers) Any ideas? I really want to finish ID of these casts so I can focus on real fossils!

Fast and dirty: Found this cast a day or two back in the stock room- someone made an attempt...so I’m going to fix it since it uses similar colors to the lion and peccary projects.

My kids and I have had a very successful year, so far, collecting a ton of Miocene fossils from the Calvert Cliffs. Along with some larger shark teeth, cetacean bones, etc., we accumulated a couple of containers full of smaller and broken teeth, ray plate pieces, unidentifiable bone fragments, and the like. After some discussion, my boys and I agreed it would be great if we could donate many of these "excess" finds to the Calvert Marine Museum to support their youth educational programs. This is actually where my kids and I first learned about fossil collecting from the Calvert Cliffs ourselves some years ago, and where the kids were able to search for (and take home) their first fossils from a simulated beach in the museum's "Discovery Room." We knew somebody must have donated those fossils, so maybe the museum would like to have ours. It could be a great opportunity to give back to the museum--and clear some counter space at home. So I sent a blind email to the museum's main address with our offer and shortly thereafter heard back from Dr. Stephen Godfrey, Curator of Paleontology. Although the Discovery Room was temporarily closed due to COVID, he said the museum was still giving out fossils in other educational programs and would love to accept a fossil donation from the boys. We were welcome to mail it in (boring), or bring it in in person (fun). Well, my boys had a scheduled day off from school last Friday, so we decided to take advantage and drive down to the museum with our donations. (Sadly, my daughter DID have school and couldn't join us.) Altogether, we brought down probably 500+ teeth, plates, bone pieces, coral fragments--including a bunch of teeth over 1/2"--the kind of stuff that a new kid would be thrilled to take home. When we got to the museum, Stephen came over from his offices and met us in a conference room to accept the goods. We sat down to do some paperwork (yes-paperwork!) and talk about what we had been collecting and, especially, the boys' best finds. Stephen seemed really impressed with the boys' willingness to give up some great stuff. I was proud of them for doing it. Well, after the transfer was done, Stephen offered to show us around the museum a bit. Of course, we jumped at the chance for a personal tour from the head curator. So off we went through the Paleontology wing into the fossil prep lab. There we met one of the volunteer preparators cleaning up a porpoise skull and we got a chance to see all of the prep tools and learn some prep techniques. Stephen showed us a bunch of fossils in the preparation process, including a jacketed baleen whale skull they had collected just a few weeks ago. He also showed us a mostly complete turtle carapace, some great vertebrae, and a lot of other cool skeletal material. We got to ask a lot of questions and learned a ton. Next, Stephen invited us to join him in the adjacent building to check out the fossil repository, not open to the public--or the way the boys and I thought of it--the inner sanctum! In this space there were movable shelves filled with boxes of cataloged fossils for long-term storage. But laid out in front were a few tables loaded with fossils that had recently come in and had yet to be processed. Stephen talked us through a bunch of these, including some pathological bones, a partly crystal-covered meg tooth, casts of a bear-dog jaw, a white shark tooth made into an Indian point, and--the highlight for me--a miocene rhino horn found at the cliffs. It was incredible what we saw in there! After getting our visual and tactile fill, we thanked Stephen for spending so much time with us --over an hour--and let him get back to his work. I know some on the forum know Stephen well, so this won't be news to them, but he is an incredibly knowledgeable and friendly person. It was great to meet him and learn so much from him. Back at the museum, we checked out all the fossil exhibits we had seen many times before. But what made this time different is that we ourselves had collected some of the kinds of stuff we were looking at in the displays. It was really cool to hear the boys say--"Hey, I have one of those," or "Dad, that's like the one you found." Having collected ourselves, the exhibit was so much more relatable--and also inspiring in all the things still out there to find. And, just to close the loop, on the way out, the boys stopped at the kids' fossil education table and there on the sign it said, plain as day, "1 fossil bag per child." So it was great for the boys to see that their donations would go to keep that table going and end up in some little kids' fossil baggie to take home themselves--and maybe start the cycle all over again. I hope you enjoy the pix! (P.S. The pix are posted with Stephen's permission, so no worries about that.)

Will follow up with current stage photos shortly! Here is what I started with: Unidentified Provenance Unknown Really bad mold mismatch/ thick seam

I recently moved into a house with some friends on our university campus, and this nice cabinet was included right past the front door. So of course I had to put together a little museum! These are just the fossils I have on me at this time, but I’ll probably pick some more up to add next time I visit home or if I go on a hunt soon. I tried adding some fun blurbs with a couple that I felt had some really cool information hiding in them. If there’s any specific part you want to see, or if you have any fun suggestions, let me know!

So for the past few weeks I’ve been camping in the Ardèche region in southern France. There was a nice little museum just a couple of miles from where I was staying. Le Muséum de l’Ardèche is the located in the small village Balazuc (which is also worth a visit). Most of the pieces were collected by Bernard Riou, a French Palaeontologist. Some pictures: Fossil insects from the Plateau du Coiron. Fossils from this location (about an hour away from Balazuc) are amazing. My favourite insect at the Museum: Nice Millipede Fossil frogs and toads from the same location Fishes, also from the same location. There also is an antelope skull on the wall, and they even have a complete skeleton of one. Very nice to see. Skeleton of a boar-like animal. How much better does it get? Well, much better: Of course, there are many more fossils from this location, including turtles, snakes, birds, leaves, pine cones… On to the next part...

A recent item in our local TV news (CHEK in Victoria) caught my eye... A local guy who makes models of anything and everything, apparently, was commissioned to make a life-sized Arthropleura (the huge myriapod from the coal swamps) for the Burpee Museum in Illinois. Catch it while the video is still posted: https://www.cheknews.ca/chek-upside-saanichton-artist-recreates-prehistoric-millipede-680876/ Would be nice to see pics of it when it arrives in place, from any of you who live in that area

Like the title says. You've got the choice to choose any fossil from any museum or collection or from any collector in the world to have as your own. What would you pick? Mine would be the "fighting dinosaurs fossil -- velociraptor vs protoceratops. It was the fossil that got me hugely interested in dinosaurs and fossils when I saw it in some book.

Singapore is a small country and we lack a dedicated fossil museum here. Thankfully, we do have the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum which hosts several impressive dinosaur skeletons and has a small section for fossils. The museum can be found at the Kent Ridge Campus of the National University of Singapore in case anyone is thinking of visiting it when my country finally reopens. Interestingly, this museum is built around 3 Diplodocidae dinosaurs, so you'll see plenty of their pictures as I showcase the place Exterior of the museum The entry is at the right The very first fossils you will spot upon entering This is the middle of the musuem. All the exhibits are built around these 3 skeletons

Hello All, I reached out a few years ago with the same question but I have plenty of SharkTooth Hill material for donation to museums or schools. the think I have most is marine mammal bones but I also have other rarer materials. Please contact me if you would like some stuff, all I ask is you pay shipping and provide me a deed of gift to your institution. Thanks Jesse

Aloha, I went to the museum yesterday. The Museum König is our big zoological Museum in Bonn, and at the moment it houses a special exhibition about Dinosaurs and the biology of gigantism. ("Groß, Größer, Dinosaurier") I got the friendly permission to upload the fotos as long as no people are in view. The Fotos I took may not be the best because I was busy entertaining a friends five year old then, but they may give you an impression of what to expect. I really liked the exhibits (real and replica) and will surely be back there to take more fotos and read the screens on a quieter day. The Exhibition is here till the 21.06.2020. Best Regards, J

Hi everyone Last Thursday I went to visit the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels as a little pre-birthday trip. I have visited this museum several times in the past few years, but this time I took my camera with me and thought it might be fun to do a photo tour of the museum for this forum Beware, this will be quite a big topic that might take a few days to complete as I took nearly 750 photo's in the museum (a lot will have to be sorted out though due to blurry quality, photo's of only name tags and doubles) as I wanted to show pretty much all fossil displays Especially the Hall of the Dinosaurs, the hall of the Mosasaurs & The Hall of Evolution will be quite complete tours Starting off with some snapshots of the hall of the minerals. The meteorite display room

Forgotten fossils in museum collections https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/thousands-of-fossils-sit-forgotten-in-museum-drawers-how-one-paleontologist

Rare museum specimen or another fake?

Hello fossil friends in Germany- A few months ago I started planning a History of Paleontology class/trip which will include the Solnhofen area. Before Christmas, the Eichstatt Wiilibaldburg Castle museum was closed. Now I do not see anything on the web site, which is all auf Deutsch about it being closed. Is it actually re-opened? Thanks jpc

Natural History Museum in London Since most of this has been covered already and recently, I won’t go deep into a tour: What I have here are some pics of what I would consider to be the “gems” of the museum. Some cool things that I hope none of you overlook whenever you visit. Very fun place, I enjoyed it even more than my last visit. Yes I brought a measuring tape with me to the museum... lol. Impressive, remarkably, huge Megalosaurus tooth. Measurement of the replica below.

I realized how much I enjoy seeing the posts of "virtual trips to the museum" and rock shops and shows. I thought I'd do a more thorough post on my recent trip to the UK and the Natural History Musuem in London. It was so huge and amazing and wonderful, that although I did not quite get to explore it as much as i would have liked, I am thrilled i got to go. So here's a little tour to whet your appetite for travel (or just armchair travel, if that's your thing!) . Believe me, there is MUCH MUCH more to see than this little bit! First of all - it IS a catheral! To science! Where the saints and angel figures would be are all animals, mythological, extinct and extant: And then the grand Hallway: And yes, it feels like you are in a Harry Potter movie: with whales: Aside from the imposing whale, there are also these amazing creatures on the main floor: Turn into the first hallway and you enter the Hall of Marine Repties: With the first articulated plesiosaur found by Mary Anning: More marine reptiles: SO many!! And these were just a FEW! And then off a side hallway was a great fossil specimen display, I only took pics of a few, but here are some UK fossils Then we wound our way down another maze like corridor and ran into these creatures (plus a few others not pictured here...): And then on to the Hall of Dinosaurs! : What is interesting is the dino skeletons are mostly elevated, so you are looking up at them, the lighting throwing interesting shadows. It's an odd choice for display, but I guess it means they don't have to put glass around each dino since it is out of reach of curious hands..... A few were ground level: My favorite dino has always been Parasaurolophus (partly because it's just fun to say Parasaurolophus...) And I was happy to see this little guy ( Coelophysis) - one of the dinosarus found out at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico (if you are out there, go to the little museum onsite...it's very nice) The next Hall was their "best of the best" treasury, in which was something I've wanted to see for a long time: the London Specimen Archaeopteryx: Last but not least was the Hall of Minerals - a massive hall full of cases of every mineral and rock in every from from all over the world. You could spend days in there alone: Just a few lovely items from there : And this is one of only 7 Mars meteorites found on earth : And thus concludes our visit to the musuem, I recommend a hot chocolate from the shop just down the street ( you can see the copper dome from their upstairs window)