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I had recently made a visit to Besom Hill, Old Ham, Manchester, UK for the spectacular remains of carboniferous fossils such as calamities, gastrioceras, and many more. Although I found some strange impressions in the shales (Listeri Marine band) and wished to get some idea on what it might be. It appears as an impression on the dark shale, has a sort of 3D impression on bottom and top. The pattern is lines radiating in a parallel manner, with slight but observable curvature. Surface is not flat, rather slightly wavy. First impression was possibly burrows, but probably not. Would it be some sort of shell or plant impression instead? Another specimen follows along as a cylinder.

Hi! I recently collected my first fossils and I'm very excited, but I would really appreciated some advice as to how best to care for them. Here in BC anyone who collects fossils from Crown Land is considered a steward of the fossil, as it is legal to collect them however they still belong to the land. This, and the fact that I genuinely care about these fossils, is why I would love some help with learning how best to preserve/stabilize the fossils. I think they're carbon fossils, and are all plants from the Eocene Era. The shale that they're set in is brittle and likes to chip, so one or two specimens have small chips that came off when I opened them and I'd like to re-attatch these (should I just glue them on? What kind of glue is best?). Lastly, I was hoping someone might have advice for making the darker fossils a bit more visible. I heard that dipping the rocks in resin can help the contrast a bit, but that seems blunt and expensive to me. Thanks for the advice and your time!

Last weekend I headed out to Princeton, BC (Canada) in search of fossils for the very first time. I focused on breaking open shale or similar rocks and was lucky enough to find my very first fossils! I'm trying to learn more about geology, fossils and the likes in my spare time so I would love if someone would be able to help me identify some of my finds. I know that all of the rocks in the Princeton area are Eocene Era, so ~56 to 34 MYA. Here are the fossils, and also a purple rock that I'm stumped on. I suspect the leaves are 'metasequoia' but I'd love more opinions. Thank you and I hope you find these rocks as interesting as I do! Purple rock 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Hello! I am looking for some spots to go fossil hunting in Durham/GTA. (Greater Toronto Area) I don’t have a car so the more local the better! I have already been to Hayden Shores and collected many trilobites but it’s just not as good as it used to be.

Hi, I'm having a brain lapse and need help identifying the form of iron I'm seeing. Some of the nodules I found seem to have a cubic structure much like standard pyrite but others are perhaps suggestive of hematite in its many crystalline forms? Also, some of the crystals are a glassy reddish color and slightly gemmy in appearance while others are completely black. Apologies for the shots. They were taken outside in a shady area but some of them show a yellow reflectance on the top facing reflective faces. Only the 3rd shot of the black nodules actually has yellowish and red staining. These were found coincident to a formation known as the Sly Gap formation which is a Devonian formation here in southern New Mexico. I believe I recall reading that that formation had nodules like this. The nodules range in diameter from 10mm to 30mm.

Hey all, I'm a newbie and would like to ask if someone here on this forum will please assist me in I.D.ing my fossil finds 😊 I've done some research but I'm still learning. I'll post a few different fossils here but with list them by # (please refer to the # when responding). Specifics on fossil types would be great. Any help is greatly appreciated. Firstly, I apologize that I didn't have a ruler when I snapped the pics. I'll do my best to include measurements listed with the pics below. All Fossils were found in North Attleborough, Massachusetts, Wamsutta Formation, Exposure w/ red shale. Thanks in advance! 😉 #1 - Thick flat red shale rock, measures about 6 inches high x 5 inches wide with what appears to be FAINT impressions of ferns throughout as well what looks like a round shaped leaf in the bottom right corner. Very hard to photograph since they're hard to see! What am I looking at here? #2 - Interesting find between split shale layer. Rock Measures about 3 inches long. 1 side is negative impression, other is positive. It's very interesting, but what is it?! #3 - This piece of red shale measures about 3 inches long and has bumps all over it. Bark? Curious what someone thinks made this impression. #4 - Small red shale fossil measures 1 inch wide. Not sure if it's a type of grass fossil. #5 - Another tiny piece of red shale. Measures 1 inch long. Another plant?

The longest one is roughly 2cm long. I’ve counted 12 on the rock, which itself is about 5cm long. All I know is that it’s from the Maotianshan shales in China. I was told it’s a Yunnanozoon, but I believe this is incorrect as the person I got it from is often wrong with their identifications.

Hi everyone, this is a fish I found a few years ago in Santa Barbara. If anyone could help with ID, or provide any resources on fossils in the area it would be greatly appreciated. The fossil is in very soft shale, measures just over 3 inches head to tail, had lots of bivalve and gastropod fossils nearby. I can provide additional pics/info if necessary. Thanks!

I have this fish in my collection . I've got it for Christmas , but sadly without a lable . The surrounding matrix is shale if this helps. I dont know where it was found or how old it is which makes identifying it much harder than usual . But maybe some of you guys know ?

My daughter was lucky enough to take a class on paleontology in Ireland and now has a 6 x 3 inch piece of shale with multiple fossil impressions. She was warned to be very careful with storage or it could crumble. It has been in a sealed plastic bag since she returned 2 years ago. We would like to display it. I’ve read on here about all kinds of cases and stands, which look great. But are these protective enough? Any recs for displaying this safely out of the bag? Thanks so much! We are very new at this!

I found this rock with both a Neuropteris scheuchzeri and this mystery fossil. I have seen nothing quite like it on the web but I probably just missed it. Part of is seems to overlap the Neuropteris and it seems to have a wide and thin part with the wide parts being further from the Neuropteris. Any help is greatly appreciated. Last picture is through a microscope and focused on the overlapping part.

Hello, just recently I did my first fossil hunting at Turimetta Beach Sydney around the exposure of Triassic shale. I found a nice dicroidium fossil I think (after seeing some similar posts from this location) and two more which I'm unsure of the species (picture below and sorry one is without scale). Any ideas would be appreciated of what species or plant group these two fossils are from which look very much like a leaf or stem stem structure. Thanks!

Would somebody please help me make sense out of some of the things I’ve found? The stuff looks like fossilized organic material to me, but I really don’t know what I’m looking at. These are embedded in Pennsylvanian period shale found in the Narragansett Bay Area of Rhode Island. Some were found in woods near the Blackstone river, others were found in an undeveloped plot of commercial use land that’s been used as a dump for all sorts of rocks used in construction, etc. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Being a Colorado native, I have taken multiple trips to the public-access Florissant Fossil Quarry located near Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument in Florissant, Teller County, Colorado. This quarry provides fossil collectors fantastic access to the shale layers of the Florissant Formation, a late Eocene (Priabonian, ~34 million years old give or take) lagerstatte known for its diverse fauna of fossil insects, in addition to plants, gastropods, and very rarely vertebrates. Most fossils occur in very thinly laminated ashy grey shales. Other lithologies present include well-sorted tan course sandstones and well-sorted grey claystones. A lacustrine depositional environment is apparent, and though the Florissant Formation has previously been interpreted as the remains of a single large lake (the retroactively named Lake Florissant), it is now generally thought that deposition occurred across several smaller lakes, which of course shifted in their exact location throughout the period of deposition. This thread is for me to share some of my better quality (or more interesting) fossil insect finds from the Florissant Fossil Quarry, and to allow other people to share their Florissant insects. I intend on updating this thread as I make more collecting trips. Most insect fossils found at Florissant are of poor quality, however exceptionally beautiful specimens do crop up quite frequently. Regardless, identification even down to family level is usually very difficult, and some specimens I even have difficulty assigning to an order. Additional reading: https://bioone.org/journals/palaios/volume-27/issue-7/palo.2011.p11-084r/DEPOSITIONAL-SETTING-AND-FOSSIL-INSECT-PRESERVATION--A-STUDY-OF/10.2110/palo.2011.p11-084r.short Please note that at least for now picture quality is not ideal. I do not have the capacity to take good quality macro photographs, but I am doing the best that I can. The scale of the ruler is millimeters, magnification (when applicable) is noted. Order Diptera (True flies): Probably my best-preserved Florissant insect (and one of the first ones I ever found). Another fly. I'd like to be able to identify this one to family (and it almost certainly is identifiable to family) but I haven't been able to place it. This is a gorgeous fossil! Magnified 20X under a stereo microscope. Another gorgeous fossil fly. Possibly a gnat (suborder Nematocera), but I'm not 100% on this identification. Partial fly of indeterminate family, most of the abdomen is apparently missing. Both wings are preserved, the thorax and head are also nicely detailed. This is an example of a march fly (Family Bibionidae), probably the most common insect at Florissant. Many specimens (such as this one) are preserved without their wings. The head and mouthparts are very nicely preserved here, I feel shameful that I could not manage a better photograph. Crane fly, (Family Tipulidae). The preservation quality is not fantastic, but the gross anatomy can be easily made out (both wings, the abdomen, thorax, head, eyes, and even the halteres and some of the legs are present). Order Hymenoptera (Bees, ants, wasps, and relatives): A nice solitary bee (clade Anthophila). The details are not as high-fidelty as some other Florissant insects, but a nice complete specimen. Order Hemiptera (True bugs): Magnified 20X under a stereo microscope. A shield bug (superfamily Pentatamoidea). This is a really neat specimen because fossil Hemipterans aren't particularly common. Indeterminate Order: A large insect that I've never quite been able to place. Two wings are very faintly preserved which would normally be indicitave of a fly, but this specimen just doesn't look much like a fly otherwise. The antennae are interesting, it's a very large insect, and the tibia has an interesting flange. Unfortunately I can't seem to get a good look at the mouthparts (which has been very useful for me in the past for identification). Magnified 20X under a stereo microscope. At first I thought this might be an ant (family Formicidae) but under magnification the shape of the head is more suggestive of a fly. Very poor preservation, I'm not confident I'll ever get a solid answer here. Larvae: A nice plump fly larva, looks to me to be from a botfly (family Oestridae) or a relative. A very strange fossil. The segmentation and tagmosis definitely means this is an arthropod of some sort, and an insect larva is my current interpretation. Still, I've never seen anything quite like it. I've had a few people suggest to me this might be the abdomen of an earwig, but that's definitely not the case (earwig cerci do not look like this or articulate with the abdomen in this manner). Non-Insect Invertebrates: Just an example of one of the tiny gastropods that are common. It takes a keen eye to see them, but once you can recognize them you realize they're very plentiful. If you have some fossil insects from this locality in your collection, feel free to post them here too! Cheers!

I was just collecting out at the Ambridge site over the weekend and among the hundreds of ferns I found, I pulled out this piece which appears to be rolled up one. It especially seems like a fern given that there’s a Calamites stem just to the bottom right. I posted on the Reddit fossil ID forum and people are saying it’s a goniatite but I’m really not seeing it and I also can’t find anything online saying something like that would even be there. I would love some insight as to what it could be regardless, because I’ve been to this site a few times now and haven’t found something like this before so it’s probably pretty rare regardless.

Hello fossil forum, first time poster here. I found this rock in Tully, NY. It’s a small round stone with what appears to be a bit of brachiopod shell sticking out of it. My question comes from the fact that it’s an extremely tough rock - all of the exposed rock at the site was extremely flaky shale which barely held together when subjected to any force. I found this rock in situ and pulled it directly from the shale around it. My first guess is that it’s just calcified but I’d like to know if there’s anything more to this strange rock. Thank you!

Found this fossil in Runswick Bay today when we were looking for ammonites. It is in shale and starting to fall apart. The top bit broke off by hand into two sections so I haven't tried to prise off the rest in case it completely crumbles. Could it be a trilobite?

Hello! I am a newbie fossil hunter, and I am asking for some ID help. My son and I visited the Kinzers Formation near Lancaster, PA , to look for fossils in the Cambrian shale. We didn't find much, which seems consistent with peoples' experiences recently, but did find traces of something that we haven't been able to positively identify. The attached photos of the specimen come from a piece of shale the we split. There's a radial pattern of darker flecks on the left side of the rock, each about 1 cm long. The tape measure is next to a longer, darker shape about 1 cm wide and about 6.5 cm long (although broken off on the right). Hopefully these pictures are helpful, but I can get out my SLR if more detailed pix would be helpful. Thanks for your thoughts!! Kerry

Located on the shore of Otisco Lake and had not seen this previously

Hello! I found this amazing fossil on my mom’s property in Pueblo, Colorado. I’ve tried to do some extensive research online to see what type of vertebrae animal/marine life this is. Could you please help identify? thank you so much!

Fossil hunting. Found a few bivalves and some suspected trilobite pieces. But the weirdest find was this. Its probably normal but thought I'd ask what it is?

New member, first time posting! This object was located a couple of winters ago in the foothills above Los Gatos, CA at about 700' MSL. A large oak tree had fallen over and in the rocks brought to the surface (from a depth of about 3') by the uprooted stump was what appeared to be some sort of a fossil jaw. The inner surface has cavities which very much look like the roots of teeth, especially molars. It reacted very strongly to a drop of dilute HCl acid. About 45 grams in weight. Other fossils found in this area are small "clam" shells, foraminifera, mineralized whale(?) bones, and once I found a shark tooth. Geology maps show this area is Miocene sedimentary but it's quite close to a boundary of Miocene/Oligocene sedimentary. I haven't a clue if this "jaw" is from a mammal, a fish, turtle, (???) or not a jaw at all. Very stout whatever it's from. Any ideas will be much appreciated. Regards, Paul