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Hey guys, I grew up hunting for fossilized wood and shell fossils in Northern California. I’d like to get back into it but I don’t know where to start, hoping to learn a lot here. Thanks!

Are there any Santa Margarita fm fossil sites that are still open/able to be collected from in and around the SF Bay Area? I want to try and hunt from the formation but all the classic sites, like bean creek, are now closed for collecting.

Hello! During the pandemic, I've spent a lot more time at home doing classes, and as a result, I've had more time for hobbies I've been interested in paleontology for my whole life, but I was mainly involved by keeping up to date with research on the natural history of these fossilized organisms instead of the actual geology and collecting of the fossils themselves. I was thinking of gifts for a friend, and I decided on sending him a nice Orthoceras when I realized how much he appreciates natural history. This purchase pretty much sprung me into these fossil forums and I'm glad to see this place is so active! Specialized online forums are rare nowadays, and I'm so grateful for all I've learned here so far. Also, this community seems quite friendly and knowledgeable! Definitely a change from most forums I've lurked. I still have so much to learn about fossils, and I'm more of a lurker than active poster honestly, so I'll probably be stuck reading old threads on here for awhile before talking too much, but I'm looking forward to talking with you guys! Here's a pic of the valley I took when hiking a trail in Mount Diablo State Park It's just about 10 minutes from my house in the East Bay.

Hey FFFriends- I basically joined because I found this while kicking around tidepools on Agate Beach in Northern California. It was 50 feet from a whale carcass, so I think I just assumed for sake of size and locale it was a caudal vertebra from a whale. The find was obscured from years of tide pool living (kelp, worms, coralline algae), so after some delicate work I finally got it cleaned. Now I am less sure it's a vertebra. Can anyone help either confirm its origin in a Cenozoic whale tail, or is it something like a whale humerus shorn of its ball socket? A big stubby vestigial radius or ulna? Or a more terrestrial megafauna fossil? Please help! I have more angles, just let me know