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Showing results for tags 'sauropod fossils'.
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Newbie Dinosaur Collecting Tips - a path exists to affordable Jurassic era Dinosaur fossils
fossilsonwheels posted a topic in General Fossil Discussion
Today is my last day off of work which means I have time to do fossil stuff. It is also the last day for a little while that I will be discussing dinosaur fossil very much. We have shark programs starting at the end of this month so my mind has to get back on the sharks. Dinosaurs go on the back burner again for awhile. I will post a bit more of the collection but I also wanted to share a little bit about my experience with Jurassic dinosaur fossils during the early stage of building our collection. Hopefully it provides something useful to another collector. As we started window shopping in preparation for beginning a dinosaur collection, one thing stood out about fossils from the Jurassic era. They are expensive. The prices are so far out of my range that I did not bother to research them beyond the ones we first encountered from various dealers. I would have to sell a kidney to get a hold of anything from that era. I saw sauropod teeth for up to 2500$ and none under 600. Don't get me started on theropods from that era. It all looked just too expensive. Our collection is built on inexpensive fossils from formations (Bull Canyon, Kem Kem, Judith River, Hell Creek) that produce some great bargain stuff. i saw nothing in the way of bargain fossils from the Jurassic beyond bits of bone or bits of bone assigned a species even though I doubt you could assign a species to those bits. They are chunkasaurus not Camarasaurus is my theory lol Anyway, I had little belief that we would add anything Jurassic except for the chunkasaurus bones for kids to handle. It did bother me though that we would have a glaring hole in the program. Kids associate the Jurassic era with dinosaurs and vice versa thanks to the movies Jurassic Park. Even if the dinosaurs from those movies were not Jurassic, the word association is unavoidable. I decided to back track the origins of the super expensive fossils from that era. I have a theory that there has to be a primary source for all of those high priced dealer bones. I think one or two entities probably supply the vast majority of fossils from the Morrison Formation which seems the primary formation for North America fossils out there. I think I was successful in the attempt to find one of the sources of the fossils. I have seen affordable Jurassic fossils for the first time and I would tend to trust the ID's because these folks dug them up. I suspect season collectors will the know the folks I am talking about. I saw a few fossils that were in the price range that we set for ourselves. It is not a lot of money at all but I saw fossils that we CAN get. We can not buy right now. The Judith River Anky and I are in a firmly committed relationship so until that tooth comes home, I am frozen on purchasing for a bit lol I do have a source though and time to start learning about Jurassic dinosaur fossils before I buy any. I know the general profile of what type of dinosaur fossil we will add. It will be a bone, not a tooth, of a sauropod. It will give us a Jurassic dinosaur to fill that blank space in the program plus it would give us some visual flair. Point is...... a little bit of above ground virtual digging can unearth the fossils you want even if they at first seem to expensive to afford. Be patient, be diligent, do your homework, and you can build a pretty awesome dinosaur collection, with out going broke- 2 replies
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