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I know very little on Pleistocene fossils but I always thought the horses that roamed during the Ice Age were much smaller than the modern ones. I found this large solid rock horse cannon bone fossil at the North Sulphur River Texas which is comparable in size to the modern day ones I find. I'm 100 % sure it's a fossil. Sorry I can't take measurements but I'm offshore working. Lol you can use my 6 yr old grandson for scale.

Went on a hunt with my son this past weekend. Had a friend join us for part of the day. We hit a part of the creek that does not get hit too hard. Was just telling her that I had found some large partial Cretodus earlier in this spot when she tells me she found a great tooth. She wasn’t kidding. Best tooth I have seen all year.

I found what appears to be a trilobite specimen in the Austin, Texas area. The fossil was found embedded in the bank of Brushy Creek in Round Rock, Texas that is in the region of Austin. I was told the specimen is unusual to this region and that no deposits in or around this area would support trilobite finds. Jess also told me that there may be people who would like to examine the fossil. I'm not sure how unusual the specimen is to this location but wanted to get some insight regarding this specimen. I'm not a professional and did use a week vinegar bath and a dreamel to remove most of the matrix. If anyone could direct me in the appropriate direction I would appreciate the help.

OK I thought the other two trip posts were getting a bit long. So I am creating separate post for the third trip for the Britton Formation in Collin county, Texas. The other 2 trips are here: I have to write these things in segments. I'm slow at writing sometimes since I write in between chores and such (i.e. other fossil hunting trips). Sunday I had a bit of time to work on writing the rest of the trip report. I was supposed to teach a couple scout badges this weekend outdoors, but wouldn’t you know it, it started raining. I thought I’d go hunting instead because the showers looked isolated, but when I looked at the radar future cast it looks like it will be raining much of the day across the whole area I usually hunt in. So I’ll work on writing the third segment between chores and cleaning fossils. I get so easily distracted. Here it is Tuesday and I'm just getting to post it I made a third trip out to the same spot with the Britton formation in the same week. Joe aka @Fruitbat and I had met at a local Mexican restaurant for dinner on Tuesday, I think it was. We live reasonably close to one another. When I met him for dinner I brought him a couple little slabs and a concretion of carboniferous plant fossils to play with. They were from my trip to Oklahoma at the end of April. During dinner we agreed to go hunting Saturday afternoon, provided I didn't get called in during the night and would be too wiped out to go hunting. I had told Joe I prefer to split the bill and pay for our own meals. He told me that his mother would roll over in her grave if he let me do that. I told him we would talk about that at dinner, trying to hold my ground. We did talk about it, but Joe is stubborn. While I was busy telling a story or talking or something the bill came and he took the bill before I thought to grab it and he paid for both anyway. I think I will either have to be quicker to grab the check or not go to dinner again unless the terms are agreed to up front. Am I being too modern or stubborn? I don't think so, but I am not a guy and I don't get how men think on these matters. I am trying to be practical and fair. I think its a generational gap. Joe is old enough to be. . . , well, lets just say older so as to not give his age away. I go to church on Saturday and the place is only 10-15 minutes away from my church. So the plan was I would go to church and then he would meet me up in a store parking lot near the spot we were going to hunt and we would go hunting from there. I was on call for my work. I have to stay within an hour’s drive of work at all times when I’m on call. I also have to have cell phone service wherever I go so my work can contact me. Believe it or not there are places within an hour of Dallas that I cannot get service at times. So this spot was as good as any I knew of within an hour of my work and I had great cell service there. I met up with Joe and we headed out to a construction dirt pile I wanted to check out first. I had seen it on the way to the spot last time. It was enormous. It was also part of the Eagle Ford group and probably less than 2 miles from the other spot. Sometimes I’ve found great stuff in construction piles. Sometimes they are complete duds. I'd classify this one a dud. This is a picture of the location. It was dirt taken from a new housing development right next to it. The soil was brown and there were a few plates of what appeared to be Kamp Ranch here and there, but the plates were pretty much compressed shell fragments. I'm still learning my formations. Been there, done that before. I knew there were better things waiting a couple of miles away, but I thought I would give the pile the once over anyway, just in case some gem of a fossil showed up. I guess I should have known that brown soil was probably not the best indicator for good fossils within the Eagle Ford. Maybe elsewhere. If anyone knows of brown soil in the Eagle Ford that has good fossils I'd like a little enlightening of what I might expect to find in it should I encounter brown soil in the Eagle Ford again so I don't completely discount and avoid it. I found numerous chunks of calcite and gypsum. There was the very rare very worn oyster and I found a few fragments of septarian nodules with the typical brown and yellow to white aragonite and calcite crystals in them, but these were pretty tumbled and worn down and not freshly broken open. After looking around for maybe 30 minutes we both decided that was enough of that. We headed out to the other location. We parked our vehicles. It was another blazing hot day. I had to convince Joe to bring something to drink. I was ready to put an extra Gatorade into my bag for him if he wasn't going to take one for himself. So he put one in his bag thankfully. It was over 90 degrees F. If you have read my other posts you know the issues with hydration I have had. I'm trying to turn over a new leaf. Plus the creek water out there didn't look quite so drinkable as the NSR water. That was sarcasm. The NSR is not so drinkable at all. I've come across places numerous times where you could tell the wild hogs had relieved themselves in the river by the smell. I still need to get me one of those Lifestraws. I digress. Back to the trip. We started the walk to the spot. This time I brought my rubber creek boots. They are the kind you get from Home Depot that the concrete pourers use when pouring concrete. So they can handle a creek pretty well, but they are a bit hot. We got to the place where the avalanche had happened and Joe wanted to explore the little creek below where the avalanche had happen. The small creek ran along the road. I can't remember if I mentioned that there were a few trees along the creek that had been taken down by beavers. One was one of the largest trees I've ever seen taken down by a beaver. It must have been over 12 inches in diameter. It made me wonder how many beavers died in felling trees. Within the creek there were some areas the water was shallow and the banks were high with lots of exposed rock and soil. I had explored it before. We didn’t really find anything other than the non-Cretaceous oysters. Just as we were about to the other creek where the hunt would begin I got a message from my work giving me a heads up that there was a deceased donor sample coming in for a pediatric, 2 month old heart transplant. I would need to go and work on that when they knew the ETA. I can't remember if I have ever posted my profession. I work in a lab and am a Histoccompatibility and Immunogenetics Specialist. I specialize in tissue typing for organ and bone marrow transplants and also for disease associations with the tissue typing. I have been doing that for 21 years in the same lab. Anyway, my work didn’t have the ETA yet they were just giving me advance notice. It had already been delayed twice. I was pretty hot and so bright I couldn't read my messages on my phone. So I found a shady spot to be able to read my messages. I sat down on the edge of a concrete slab poured to prevent erosion. It was a peaceful little place with the water running over the rocks. A tree was perched on the edge of the bank above me. I snapped this pic of Joe while I was sitting there reading my messages, replying and waiting for the response. We went on hunting while I waited to hear back on the ETA of the heart donor's tissue. Joe was the first to find something. He found a pretty little red ammonite about 1.5 inches across with a bit of matrix still on it. It was probably less than 30 feet from where Joe is in this pic. He offered it to me. I told him no way that it was his little memento of the hunt. If he found nothing else worthy of keeping that little beauty was worthy of keeping. I didn't get a pic of it. Maybe Joe can provide one. We continued with the hunt. I am not fast about covering ground while hunting, but I definitely move faster than Joe. Shortly after we got into the creek and began to hunt I got a call from the on call supervisor at my work telling me that the sample would be there around 6:00. That meant I had maybe 45 minutes left to hunt. We’d only been in the creek maybe 10 minutes max. Since I knew my time hunting would be cut short I was trying to cover more ground. I soon left Joe inspecting an exposure and moved on to another exposure further down the creek. I found a number of ammonite fragments. I found several halves of ammonites. Here are a few of them. The two ammonite halves were within 1 inch of each other along with the baculite fragment. I assume they are both Metoicoceras of some kind. Please chime in if you know what they are. I think this one must be a Placenticeras pseudoplacenta var. occidentale. Please help educate me if I am misidentifying them. I am very new at this. Sometimes I assume a species based on what I know is in the formation if it kind of looks like it. I am doing that with this one. I don't know of another smooth genus in the Britton. I also found a few more interesting bulbous concretion. Almost all of the concretion material are flat little slabs of rock not more than ½ to 1 inch thick, but occasionally you find little odd shaped ones or bumpy ones. I picked some of them up hoping I can figure out how to expose whatever may be inside. I found a few more baculite pieces. I found the longest fragment I had found. I also found a few tiny gastropods. Very cute and tiny. Here are pics of all the baculite fragments found over the 3 days. I am probably not the idea naturalist for combining the fossils from 3 hunts within a week from the same local. The largest fragment I did find when I hunted with Joe. This is one of the fragments. When it is wet it looks like shiny copper. When dry it looks like a metallic rose gold. It is lovely piece. I have a few others that have flecks of it on them. A few have a rainbow kind of hue. OK I am trying to break up my posts for this trip so I can include more pictures. Bare with me. More is coming. Oops left out a pic description. These are a number of the fragments I found that day with the exception of the Placenticeras ones.

My wife and I went to North Texas with the main lure being to collect on the N. Sulphur River. Since we were staying in Sherman we also visited Post Oak Creek. Lake Texoma was high on the list since we were so close, but prior posts about Texoma dissuaded us to " not take any chances ". At the time, people were stating the Lake Texoma Army Corp. of Engineers considered it a no-no regarding the removal of Ammonites from Corp. property. Since that time several years ago I have read multiple posts about collecting there but no caveats. We certainly have more trips to Texas from Missouri / Misery, and collecting at Lake Texoma would certainly be a destination. Set me straight...................

I got my hand on a Crinoid calyx from somewhere in Texas (no location attached other than creek), and I’d like to know if this should be prepped any more, and if it is worth seeking professional help (I certainly can’t do it yet). It’s around four inches (I think, it’s not with me right now). Thanks for any advice!

I found this jaw bone today on the Brazos River in Texas. It’s unlike any other I’ve found, I’m wondering if it’s croc or gator maybe? The bone seems to have the pock marked look I’ve seen in pics of jaws of those critters.

Found in north Fort Hood near Gatesville, TX next to the Leon River. Unsure of formation. *would love to know if anyone has that info* Resembles a fish tooth to me, but this one is MUCH larger than any I've ever found (in eastern NC where I live), plus this one seems to have a root attached. It's approximately 3.5cm standing tall, and the "root" is approximately 3cm at its widest point. Quarter is for size reference. I googled some globidens images (as someone suggested) but I have not seen any that precisely match my specimen. For instance, mine does not have any indication of a point or tip. The "enamel" is also completely smooth, and lacks any evidence of striations which were evident in the googled images. It could be, of course, that maybe my specimen is just extremely worn. Any input is much appreciated!

I'm preparing a teacher education workshop which includes a fossil hunting and identification activity. The teachers are coming from many states across the country. I'd like to include some suggestions of sites where they could replicate the things they learn and experience during the workshop with their students in the vicinity of their respective schools. I have the Indiana schools covered. For the ones near Dallas, I'm thinking Mineral Wells Fossil Park (and maybe Ladonia for older, more adventuresome students). The ones I need help with are sites within field trip range of the following: Austin, TX ( @Uncle Siphuncle, @KimTexan, @BobWill, @erose)? Atlanta, GA Golden, CO Palm Bay, FL (near Melbourne) Naples, FL (any shell dump piles accessible to and suitable for k-12?) @digit ? Bentonville, AR Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, either posted here or via PM. I have alternative activity suggestions for them (e.g. bags of matrix to sift, etc) if they can't do a field trip, but there's nothing quite like the experience of hunting and discovery in the field... I would have done backflips if my grade school had had a fossil trip...

Early- and Mid-Cretaceous Archosaur Localities of North-Central Texas. Guidebook for the field trip held October 13, 2015 in conjunction with the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Dallas, Texas https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283711331_Early-_and_Mid-Cretaceous_Archosaur_Localities_of_North_Central_Texas https://figshare.com/articles/Early_and_Mid_Cretaceous_Archosaur_Localities_of_North_Central_Texas/1608173 http://chrisnoto.com/publications.html Yours, Paul H.

Does anyone know any good fossil sites in Denton or Wise county? I am particularly looking for shark teeth but anything will do. I have fossil hunting fever and would love some interesting new places to try.

Hello everyone! I'm taking the wife and kids to South Padre Island in a couple of weeks. Of course I'm hoping to find some fossils while I'm down there. I've read about people finding some Pleistocene fossils while on the beach. Does this seem far fetched? Any advice would be much appreciated. Thank you.

Hi all, not looking for a speciation on these, just a thumbs up or down on whether these are actual fossils or just me being hopeful. If they're fossils I'll work on getting them out of matrix and cleaning them up. My wife picked up this piece around Belton because it looks like it has an impression from an ammonite and some cool calcite crystal on it, but when we flipped it over we saw these. What are these two bumps. Are they shells or just me being hopeful? Each one is about 2 inches across. This is out of the cretaceous, I originally thought Comanche Peak, but the more I read I think it might actually be Edwards? I'm so confused on which formation they came from. Thanks!!

Good Evening, All, My dad called me about some interesting fossils that his sister found on her son-in-law's ranch in Coleman County, Texas. They are quite strange. They are approximately 1.75 inches across, and are weathering out of hard limestone. I haven't seen them in person, only in the pictures that I'm attaching. The area is Permian, possibly Jagger Bend / Valera, though I don't know the actual location of the ranch. Anyone with any ideas? I'm stumped!

I haven't had much time to hunt lately but I did manage to squeeze in a North Sulphur River creek hunt. My finds were not great but I did manage to find a nice variety. The fossil horse cannon bone is probably my favorite due to the preservation. It's solid rock. Lol my grandson carried it around the house all night when I brought it home. The Xiphactinus vert, old bottles and artifacts were a nice bonus to the usual Mosasaur material. This creek has some killer flint in it so I can see a nice arrowhead coming soon.

And so my wife and I found our way back into the field today after the rain played out. The ground had turned to pig slop, but when chasing echinoids, I like it that way for enhanced contrast. Any advantage these old eyes can get is worth exploiting. This Phymosoma texanum was showing its good side for this photo. The other side was missing. No worries as we scored 9 high grade, perfect ones plus a score or more of high grade u-prep-m Heteraster texanus echs for gift or trade.

Buried in my prep bin I found a marl nodule from the Corsicana Formation that I snagged for the gastropod/bivalve association. Longing for the days before the site was built over, I pulled this thing out for prep. Well surprise, surprise! Beneath the Neithea bexarensis and Gyrodes rotundus was a Dakoticancer australis carapace completely hidden. I’m lucky I didn’t run my scribe through it while reducing matrix. The movable finger from the right chela is poking out from under the Neithea, but I opted not to blow apart the other fossils exploring for appendages. Anyway, it’ll keep.

I saw some construction in San Antonio near an old echinoid site of mine that has been covered up with asphalt and grass for over a year - Corsicana formation. I went Sunday for a hunt and got caught in the rain. I was able to score 8 nice Hemiaster wetherbyi de Loriol, 1887. Size 15.5 mm to 25.8 mm. I've never found one that small before. The cleaned up very nicely.