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Hi all, I haven't been very active on this forum in a while, but I've still been collecting and prepping. Thought I would share a bit of a milestone with you guys.and talk a little about what I've been up to in the time I haven't been active on here. First up, my first Pulalius vulgaris! I had the great pleasure of doing some hunting in the Lincoln Creek Formation with Will @Fossilis Willis a little over a year ago and found this small concretion just over 2 inches in width. How it looked when I got it home: Knocked the extra matrix off quickly, and set it aside to be prepped when I felt more confident in my ability and tools. A few months ago I finally got to work on this conc. Lots of scribing later I found some shell material! From then on it was just a matter of dialing the 9361 way down, and slowly chipping away at the matrix. Some of it had really great separation, and lots of it was the stickiest material I've worked with. Hours were spent holding my breath scribing off layers of matrix less than 1mm thick. Slowly but surely the ventral side of the crab started to appear. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, especially for my first attempt. Really wish the legs had come out better, the prominent leg on the left is disarticulated and dives so deep into the matrix I can't expose it further. The end of another one runs off the concretion below it but no sign of the rest of the leg. And on the right I found a few busted up floating pieces that don't show up super well in the photos, but nothing substantive. I suspect there might be more leg material deeper in but the stylus of the scribe needs to be sharpened and I need to work on other projects so I'm calling it done for now at least. Overall a fun and informative prep, really pushed my limits. I definitely feel a lot more confident about scribing up close and in tight quarters after this one. Massive thanks to Will for his help finding this! As for what I've been up to lately, an even bigger thanks to Will for mentioning a local paleontology group while we were out hunting. I joined NARG (the North American Research Group) and I've been collecting with the group, writing articles for their newsletter, and presenting at their meetings. I've also been taking Geology and Zoology classes at my local community college. This hobby has become a pretty big part of my life, I bet most of you can relate. I find it almost unbelievable looking back at my journey since I joined this forum in 2019. At the time I was 13 years old, looking to get an ID for a trilobite I'd come across online. The forum has been an amazing tool for learning about everything paleontology related and played a huge role in helping me grow my passion. I remember reading through posts of fossil hunts and prep-work on this forum and wishing I could do that someday, and now here I am. Thanks in no small part to the inspiration of this forum, and all the input and help I've gotten from forum members over these past 4 years. In 2 weeks I'll be graduating High School, and in a few months I'm moving out to study geology at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. I honestly don't know what to say except, Thanks TFF!

I just picked up this small fossilized crab, I am told it is from the Oligocene period and was found in the Lincoln Formation SW Washington. My research leads me to believe it is a Pulalius Vulgaris. If anyone can confirm its identity I'd be grateful. There are also these cylindrical cross sections seen in the second picture. Are these fragments of limbs, buried under the matrix or something else?

I went on a fossil trip to the state of Washington and bought a bunch of fossil concretions, agatized Aturia and clams and a couple other odd things. Whilst buying and making trade deals, part of one deal was to do my majic on this large crab in a concretion. Funny thing is, I knew this crab from several years ago. I offered the guy who found this crab money for it every year for a few years but he just didnt want to let go of it. I cant blame him, its a really big crab. He had traded it to my new freind for a really really nice and really exspensive agatized Aturia. As part of a trade I offered my services and told him I go do my majic on it. He had heard of me and seen some of my work so he let me bring it home. Seems like im getting known as the 'Crab Guy'? Nice. So, today I went on the prep attack on this rock. Its got a really soft 'rine' and trying to save it is really hard. Lots of glue. also removed lots of rock to get it to where I want so I can do the 'smoothing' and make the rock contour to the crab. The guy who prepped this out went really deep in places, so its making for more difficulty and not what im used to. Gunna be interesting to see this play out. 1sr pic is how I received it. 2nd pic is me trying to save the 'rine'! 3rd pic is after a bunch of rock removal. A long ways to go still. RB

Yeah, I know, we are all sick and tired of these fossil crabs in concretions prep threads. Too bad, as my buddy Kris says. Here is a rather odd rock in the sense that the outer layer is not only really soft, but full of little tiny black particles? Not a clue what they are. Ive never seen then before. If there are any tippy tippy's going into this soft layer Im afraid they will be gone? Also, see that little piece of leg on the back right side, It is not in the right place or its trying to fly a kite. Really high in the rock compaired to the carapace. I cant tell if its leg #1 or 2, but this crab is already scarying me. Right now this tells me that the 'rear end' is either not there or has problems? Time will tell.

I wasnt going to start this crab till Febuary but was sick and tired of trying to finish up some of B-Grade crabs and started this today. I had some really high hopes for this crab. I get started removing rock and finally got down to crab, and,,,,,,, DANG!!! Ran into the ventral side! DANG!!! Went into the house and made me a wiskey and coke and sat back down to think about this. Thought to myself, "ok, I might as well do a ventral side". A bit scary since ive never really done this side before and realized that Im gunna have to attack it in a steep bowl style of prep. Gunna be real interesting. Just hope I can do a good job? I dont know this side of a crab so im going to take it slow. My fingers are crossed. RB

Got some very bad news today. First very sad, then confused, then mad. Mixed myself a whiskey and cola at 7:20 this morning and went out to the garage and picked out 4 crab concretions. The very first one I read wrong! Fixed it and grabbed another. Read this 2 one right and also the 3rd and 4th. Done prepping for the day even thought its quite early but nice to have so many crabs ready to go. First and second picture is the same conc. Dug a hole, found ventral, turned it over and fixed it. 3rd photo is the second concretion. Found dorsal. Last photo is all 4 concs ready to go. RB

Aaaaaaaalrighty then. I havent been out in the prep garage too much, but went out today and picked out 4 "iffy' concretions. One looked better than the rest, so,,, started on that one. This is what happened. Might be a good crab? Oh, this concretion is 2nd from the left. Looks to have a 'rear end', thats always a good thing! Time will tell for the rest of the crab? RB

Ok, today I did a bunch of work on getting some crab concretions ready for prep. Took me most of the day, but got 7 of them glued up and ready for prep once the glues sets up. Im going to do a step by step for only one crab though. Hope it turns out to be a good one? here are some pics of my work today. The first two pics are of the same crab that I will show the prep process of. RB

I started this one today. Went deep to try and find the carapace and BAM!!! Hit the dang carapace!!! I hate that but it does happen. Here are pics of different stages of prep so far. got a ways to go but after that monster big concretion from New Zealand, its nice to see progress so soon!! RB

Ive been off and on working on some very sticky crabs these last few days. I don't like working on them but they are great for what I call 'gas crabs'. You can still get good crabs from sticky concretions, but they do take more concentration and more time. Only bad thing is,,, if it turns out to be a very bad crab then you've just waisted 3, 4 hours or more. I did just that the other day. Took about 4 hours to get the carapace exsposed and find the claw and legs on the left side, then found nothing on the right side but 'crab bits'. Finding crab bits is almost always a very bad thing! So I simply picked up another 'sticky' crab and went to town. Here is what ive done so far on this one. No telling wether or not I will finish it, that is up to the crab. RB

I was doing some organizing and clean up on my prep bench today, just to make room for me to prep. I have a real bad habit of starting a prep project and then putting it aside for later and starting another prep project. Anyways, I ran into this one today. I have no idea how long its been sittin on the shelf above my bench, but a few years at least? I went through all the pieces and cleaned them up and started the 'gluing' process. This one is going to be a 'gas crab' for sure, but I think it may turn out to be a purty nice gas crab? Lots of pieces came off the top of this thing and those pieces have crab parts in them so fighting through the glue is going to be a job and much of the carapace shell is missing, but we'll see? My fingers are crossed. RB

I am always 2nd guessing when I prep out crabs. I had high hopes for this one, but,,,,, you can never know for sure till you get lots of the crab rock removed. This one was in two halves and glued back together. Lots of glue to get through and at first once I put in about 4 hours or so it wasn't looking too good. Also, I cant see a rear end on this thing. That's always bad in my book. I knew there was more leg on the left side, just wasn't sure where or how good they might be? Wasnt sure at all about the legs on the right side either? In this first pic all I had was 3 legs. Some leg is always better than no leg, but for me, I want all 8 of them! Doesn't happen too often. Heck, almost never! Part of the carapace was also in the upper part of the rock being that the crab was somewhat sticky when my youngest son 'wacked' it open. So it looks a bit beat up. I can fix that though. I don't like having to 'fix' things, but that's the way it goes sometimes. RB

I don't usually write more than a sentence or two and sometimes a paragraph, but this will be a long one. This is also 20 years in the making. Way back when, I met a guy over the internet and made a crab concretion trade. After that he invited me to Washington for a crab concretion fossil hunt. I couldn't wait. I dragged along my intire family. Me, wife and 3 kids. My youngest son Coleton was 8 years old. Hes 28 now. I always wanted to take my kids on fossil excursions and get them out into mother nature. We get to our camping site where we were to meet this new fossil friend of mine in the late afternoon and its raining cats and dogs! My new friend shows up the next morning and we get packed up with all out fossil hunting gear and off we go. It was only about 20 minutes to get to the spot where we park and then,,, we hike down this canyon about 15 or 20 minutes and get to this little creek. We head down steam and within 4 minutes or so I see this little bank that has crab balls in it. Now im excited! My kids and I started digging out crab concs and my new friend was literally in the creek digging out another conc. I see that he picked one out and 'wacked' it right then and there with his little 4 pound mini sledge. A big piece broke off and fell into this overflowing creek. I had a heart attack!!! I tell him that he should keep each and every piece of a crab concretion. He looks around in the creek and finds one of the pieces. he then comes onto shore and then,,,,,, gives it to me and says I can have it! First time anyone has givin me a fossil for free and I feel overwhelmed. What a freakin nice guy. I wasn't expecting that. Anyways, we begin to go downstream again. We had to clime over a huge log jam and kept working our way down stream. I was lagging behind. I was already a very happy camper having several concs. I had one of those carpenter tool belts where my pick hammer hung onto a metal loop. I was walking along a very slippery sloping bank and slipped. I landed on my pick hammer onto my left ribs. I layed there and realized that if I didn't take a breath I was going to pass out. I finally was able to take a gasp of breath! I looked over to my left and saw my youngest son just going around a corner in the creek. I figured I was going to be there awhile. I could not move! I hurt really bad. Also, my feet were in the creek and the water was cold enough that if you stayed in it your feet would become numb! I knew they would be back at some time, just didn't know when? Well, within a few minutes my son came around the corner, saw that I was in bad trouble and went and got the other two guys. They took my backpack and helped me to get up. it took me about 3 hours to get back up the creek and back up the canyon to the trucks. Every step was nothing but pain! Especialy each left step! The next morning I had the biggest baddest bruze on my left sife the size of a basket ball!!! Even the drive home was super painfull! I was about 12 hours from home. Took me about 3 weeks to be able to really get around again, but slowly. Two things, my new friend gave me several concretions and my 8 year old son had the thought to check up on his dad. Brings tears to my eyes!!! I don't remember any of the other crab concs, but the one my buddy found in the creek and gave to me is now something special to me. I was still purty new to prepping fossil crabs and here is a picture of this one. Back in those days I didn't have a whole lot of patience and was always in a hurry to get things finished. Not a good thing. While I was putting my fossil display cabinet together the other day, my wife came in and asked why this concretion was not also in the cabinet. I told her I could easily see that it needed a lot more work and that this one was one of my early crabs. It is now being more proffesionlay prepped. Just wish I could spell? Ha!!!

Its been almost a year sence I went on a fossil hunting trip. A bit early too. My youngest son decided he wanted to go visit an old school buddy who lives in Oregon and wanted to know where all my fossil crab locals were, so I decided to go along for part of the trip and just show him. Sad that lots of crab sites are closed now, and not only that, but found another site just recently closed too! Brand new gates everywhere! Anyways, it took us 2 full days of driving and hunting to get the first 4 sites done, then we said our good bys and he went onto Oregon and I went back up into Washington to do some trading with some crab guys. I took along about $1600 worth of trading material so I was quite prepaired for some wheeling and dealing. Got rid of all of it and turned it into more crab concretions. Now ive got about 2 or 3 years worth of crab balls to play with. Here is a picture of my son way up on a cliff side that I would not intertain myself nowadays. RB

Here is a crab I got from John Spina. This poor crab has almost no leg to speak of but has some very nice 'leoperd spots' on the arms. Im going to build a bunch of legs on this one. I also used a special 1 inch cube made by Ray-Aero Grower for scale. Thanks so much Ray. I feel I need to somehow reciprocate. That was just super duper nice of you. This is going to take some time cause im now back to working on the house and im gunna be gone for a week or so going to Washinton to go get me some more crab concretions. Could be 3 or 4 weeks, maybe more? RB

I didn't want to drag this on, so I finished this up first before I posted it. I traded for this concretion last summer and actually had it traded again to another fellow. Once I realized it had some major problems I decided to go ahead and prep it out and not trade it. The worst kind of trade is when one or both party's are not happy. When I first took a look at this crab I figured it was a perty good crab. Then I sliced off some rock with my water saw and took another look at it and realized it had some rather bad placement for the claws and also would take a ton of glue to get it back together. The legs has some bad preservation and the arms too, but that's mother nature. One of the good things is that it has 5 tippy tips! Just no claws! This crab was a very tuff crab to prep and took about 40 hours to finish it up! It does have some slight disarticulation and is missing a couple of pieces too. In these first two pictures I was worried and wondering if it had any leg on the right side. I knew it had lots of leg on the left side only cause I had to glue back on a big piece of rock that also had some leg in it.