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Hello, Could someone who has the book "A Field Guide to Fossils of Texas" by Charles Finsley pm me photos of some figures from it? There are a couple specimens I want to reference. Thank you.

Howdy folks! I am currently working on a project discussing the now closed Swatara gap site. It was an amazing locality with intriguing history, and I’m hoping to do it justice in my presentation. In the pursuit of this goal, I’d like to include a few shots of what this site looked like before it was backfilled with limestone, however my initial source for these photos unfortunately lost them. If anyone has Shots of the old site, I’d appreciate it if you could share them, and full credit will be given in the presentation. Appreciate your time guys, happy digging!

There is an update on the IPhone now that allows you to quickly and easily remove the background from any photo. For example. The background in this photo is white, but there are shadows, and the ruler. 1. To remove the background on your IPhone, simply hold your finger on the subject until a white line races around the edges and “copy or share” shows up. Like in the video below FullSizeRender.MOV 2. Click on “share” and scroll down to “save image” and that’s it. Look in your photos and you will have a photo of your fossil with the background removed like this. It has done quite a nice job at picking out all those cusps and serrations. Have fun. And it might be fun if people feel inclined to post some results of their experiments with this technique.

So I'm sure there's a topic already posted covering how to best take pics for newbies - but I can't seem to find it! So, if anyone has links to said topics, I'd much appreciate them!

I don’t know why it took me this long to think about using my daughters light board to take my pictures. It even has a millimeter scale.

For those who have never been, a couple of photos of Big Brook and yesterday’ s disappointing catch

I am having troyble uploading images. Most photos I take exceed this.

The last time I got out on the river was back in mid-January. Since then, I have watched the USGS gauges while the weather stayed mostly dry. The river height and flow was dropping steadily and just when I was ready to go hunting again, the entire house got sick with the flu - this was right before the coronavirus started grabbing all the headlines. It was very frustrating to sit inside the house while the weather was so beautiful and the river getting so low. Yesterday was the first day where the wife and I both felt close enough to 100% to brave the trip and go hunt some fossils. I loaded up the truck the night before and we headed out the door just before 7am. The drive was uneventful and we arrived at the Gardner ramp on the Peace River about 9am. We hadn't been back to Gardner since 2017, so it was a pleasant change of scenery from my usual spots. The plan was to revisit a couple of old spots we had found on previous trips back in 2016. I hadn't laid eyes on this stretch of river in a long time, so I was not sure what changes to expect. To my surprise, the ramp area was dead. Nobody else was there. Usually the ramp is quite busy, but our timing must have been very good. We had the entire area to ourselves. (Going on a tuesday morning helps) The last time I was at Gardner, the water level was almost two feet higher, so I was pleased to see how low the water was. The current was also quite lazy. The USGS Zolfo Springs gauge read 4.6 feet and the flow was about 120. You can tell in the photo below how low the water is by looking at the opposite bank. Now, I am not going out of my way to obfuscate the exact location of my search spots in this report. This is because this stretch of river is heavily hunted and these spots are known to other hunters. This fact was reinforced on me when we arrived at the first spot and found shovel holes and spoil piles nearby. But more on that later... I have been to Gardner a handful of times previously, but the water was never this low. In fact, I ended up jumping out of the kayak and dragging it behind me while I waded through knee-deep water. My wife rode like a queen in the front seat of the tandem kayak and snapped photos. Our first destination was about a mile upstream, so there was a combination of wading/pulling the kayak and paddling. The water was running surprisingly hard in a couple of places, but the paddling was never too difficult. Most of the paddling was fairly easy with the wind pushing us from the south. We were looking for a clayey layer exposure known for producing prolific quantities of common fossils of mixed types - Miocene and Pleistocene material intermingled and then compacted into a tight cemented matrix. This material falls out of the sandy banks and into the river, where it breaks apart into gravel, fossils, and sand. There are several of these exposures along the Gardner stretch in both directions from the ramp, but each one has a slightly different character and mix of fossils. Some are heavier on Miocene material and some are heavier on Pleistocene, but all are mixed from being reworked over long periods of time by river action. Before the fossil spots, we passed the entrance to Charlie Creek. You can't really tell from this photo (below), but the water is less than waist deep here. Charlie Creek is on the right and the main channel of the Peace is on the left. We didn't explore Charlie Creek today and we kept going. Finally, we found the first part of the exposure I was looking for. Flood action has lengthened the visible exposure and there was a gravel bed present that was missing on my previous trips. You can see it in the photo below as the dark stripe on the lighter-colored sandy bottom. The sun was lighting up the water and it had the color of weak tea. Here there was a fossiliferous layer of rocky-clayey matrix weathering into the river channel. You can see it as a white layer in the sandy bank in the photo below. There were shovel holes and a few spoil piles in the area, so other hunters had already visited this spot. The holes and piles looked fairly fresh, so it was likely within the the last few days. Still, the exposure is productive and a lot of new material is crumbling out the bank and ending up in the river. There is a lot of gravel and clay lumps to sift. Digging test holes along the water-line yielded a mix of small common fossils - dugong ribs, small shark teeth, megalodon teeth, turtle scutes, mammoth ivory fragments, mammoth tooth fragments, horse/camel/bison teeth, and the occasional vertebra/skull. I was hoping to find some nice intact megalodon or mammoth teeth. I found small pieces of both, but no large intact examples. Here are a couple of in-situ photos. In the first, you can see a nice bluish-colored shark tooth weathering out of the sandy matrix. In the second photo, you can see a piece of bone coming out of the matrix material - which is crumbly and loosely-consolidated with pieces of varying sizes. My wife was still not feeling too great physically, so she mainly surface-collected along the water-line while I shoveled a ton of sifters worth of gravel. I found a lot of dugong ribs. It was an All You Can Eat Ribs Special and I filled up a sack with them before I stopped picking them up. I left a bunch behind - just too many to mess with. I would work a spot for about 30-45 minutes and then move on further upstream searching out more exposures to sample. We sampled four different spots along a roughly mile to mile and a half stretch. All told, we spent about six hours on the river. Eventually, we turned around and decided to head back to the ramp to beat rush hour going back into Tampa. We had a leisurely, slow, and pleasant float back downstream to the ramp. On the entire trip, we only saw two other sets of humans. One was a husband-wife fishing duo who passed us in a flat-bottomed bass boat with a small outboard motor. The other was a group of three locals fishing from chairs near the ramp when we got back. Surprisingly, we only saw one small gator near the confluence with Charlie Creek. We did see and hear lots of birds though, which was nice. Here is some of the stuff we found. Some is still drying out. Big chunks of micro-matrix are on the right - those will be searched later from home. Lots of ribs in the foreground. Lots of bone chunks and oddballs on the left in the rear. Unfortunately, I didn't find a single intact megalodon. The half-tooth in the photo was a tease. I saw it sticking up out of the sandy bottom and was excited when I reached down for it. I was disappointed when it was only half! LOL.

When or is there a book available for sale specifically on Moroccan Trilobites??

Came by this the other day in San Mateo Ca., what do you think ? The first picture of this ? is not wash the other pictures i wash this ? whatever it is. The last 3 pictures are of the Crack opening where it's been chip open, you can see there a picture with the chip opening. I use a Microscope on last 4 pictures. Me i think it's a Fossil of something . So if someone can tell me what they think or point me to a place i get it look at . Thank you.

There was a fossil show in Oxford yesterday. Unfortunately due to family commitments I was unable to attend. Did any UK members go? Photos?

Hi Folks, Recently I read about "digested teeth". This is in regards to teeth from prey animals that have been consumed by a predator and then excreted later. One example would be whale teeth eaten by a megalodon. Does anyone have any photos of digested teeth, or any knowledge to share on how to identify a suspected specimen of this type? Thanks in advance! MikeG

I found a simple technique for getting better up close photos from an iPhone 6. I hold, with one hand, my 10x Hastings Triplex hand lens centered over the iPhone lens and the phone. See the difference (look at "ton" in Washington in these photos of a 1 $ US bill. Now, maybe we can see the pebbly texture of eggs or the grain in petrified wood. Photo without handlens:

Hi all I can’t upload any photos at the moment any help please and thank you.

How can I upload photos into my own gallery for others to see? This photo is some fossilized leaves found locally in our mountain area. I do not know period or family etc. Would love any feedback as I am new to this site as of today. Thank you, Kim

Spent a few hours tonight mucking around trying to get some nice macro shots of some insects in Baltic amber. Here are the results. Field of view is approximately 7mm, but some of these have been cropped considerably.

First of all thank you for the join and all the info already published! I've been obsessed with sharks since I was a kid and naturally loved shark teeth. My family that used to visit Florida would always give me some as I grew up and I talked my parents into getting me a meglodon tooth. As of today I went on my first adventure and found me a vertebrae behind the YMCA baseball/soccer fields in Summerville. Seems to be the only concrete directions to a place I can find on google. Unfortunately I am only temporarily here and a full blown rookie. I am here for C17 school at Charleston afb and will be returning to the north east (Jersey) mid December. Was wondering where some other areas I may venture to legally and have some luck? Also I'd love to join anyone that is interested in having me along. I have a car and willing to travel (even pick you up). I plan on trying out coosaw creek by a church tomorrow after school. Just reply here or message me if you'd like to join me or let me join you. Thanks - Paul

Ladies and gentlemen- The new year is coming upon us. I bet you need a fossil themed calendar to hang in your office/lab/bathroom etc. I have just the thing. For the past ten year almost, I have put together a fossil prep calendar. This is a fund raising project for SVP's Preparation Grant. Money raised from the sales of this calendar go towards improving fossil preparation by granting cash to a museum or person who proposes a project. This year the winner was a young lady from Egypt who will be coming to the states to learn some prep techniques that she can bring back to her museum to help prepare Egyptian fossils professionally. I have a few calendars leftoves from the SVP (Society of Vertebrate Paleontlogy) meeting in Salt Lake City last month Anyway there are 12 great pix of... a New Zealand whale skull in the field, a Cretaceous theropod tooth, an Eocene primate skull with associated CT scan, a Camarasaurus premax, a Solnhofen pterosaur, a White River mammal posing for its portrait, dino footprints doing the same, a pentaceratops vert in the lab, thin section of hadrosaur teeth, a pile of aetosaur scutes being sorted, a nice plaster jacket form a mosasaur dig and its human caretaker, and a Ceolophysis bonebed shot (one heckuva pile of Triassic bones). yes, friends you need a calendar to adorn the collection. To receive one of your very own, please send me money that I will pass along. Make checks payable to me. 20 bucks (USA) per calendar and 5 dollars shipping per order. Send to : JP Cavigelli Tate Museum 125 College Dr. Casper, WY 82601 (Note: The calendar comes with American holidays and a few Canadians)

My ten year old son has a wonderful opportunity to display his local fossil collection at the Burpee Museum in Rockford, Ililnois for their national fossil day. As he is only ten, many of his fossils are maybe a tad less than museum quality. So, for part of his display he will have some of his mifflin ordovician fossils. He has a couple hash plates with assorted trilobite fragments which are cool as heck, but I think it would be nice to display some photos of complete, or almost complete specimens to go along with his fragments. The species whose images I am requesting are: Gabriceraurus Basiliella Thaelops Calyptaulax Isotelus on a side note. He also has partial tully monster fossils from Mazon Creek, so maybe a couple images of well preserved mazon creek animals would be nice to display also. Maybe the common shrimp and tully. Thanx for any help - it's for a great cause. The images would be used for only six hours then discarded if that is what you wish, or if acceptible, he could keep them for any potential future educational display.

The local museum is hosting another dig at Shark Tooth Hill in Bakersfield, California. Join us October 9,10,11 for some middle Miocene madness! Attached are some shark teeth we've found on previous digs their. Join us on the Miocene fossil hunt: http://bit.ly/bvmnh_digs

Finally got my camera from AM Scope while it works great the magnification is way too much. So I bought a digital microscope with less magnification. I had posted earlier that I had found microscopic sphericals with what I believe to be shocked quartz. Which could indicate an ancient impact I got a photo of a few of these. I also have a photo of a tooth that I can not ID and a pic of some microscopic SD gold. I will add more pics soon.

Hi everyone, My lab colleagues and I are looking for fossil pictures of: 1 - Cordaitales, specifically showing the 'V'-shaped leaf and 2 - Strobylothyone rogenti, a fossil Holothurian (sea cucumber) We are currently working on a textbook entitled “Biodiversität und Erdgeschichte" ("Biodiversity and Earth History”), The book is written by Prof. Dr. Jens Boenigk and Dr. Sabina Wodniok, scheduled to be published in 2014 by Spektrum in Heidelberg, Germany. In addition we plan to publish an electronic version as part of an e-book package, which will be sold to scientific institutions. It is important that we'd have permission to publish the pictures in our textbook. You would, of course, be credited for the image. All the best, Edvard --- Dr. Edvard Glücksman Postdoctoral Fellow Jens Boenigk lab Allgemeine Botanik, Universität Duisburg-Essen Universitätsstr. 5, D-45117 Essen Germany Tel (office): +49(0)201183-4514 Tel (mobile): +49(0)17699830154 Departmental website: http://www.uni-due.de/allgemeine_botanik/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/glucksman