What was the first fossil you ever found?

[Brevicollis]

Hello, i have a question. I want to know what was the first fossil you ever found and with wich fossils your collections stardet. 

I'll begin :

My first fossil that i ever found was a beautiful brachiopod that i found while hiking in poland at the age of 4. Sadly it was stolen in kindergarten, and it was never Seen again...

The first fossil in my collection then was a Spinosaurus tooth, because Spinosaurus was my favourite dinosaur at the time.

[North]

46 minutes ago, Brevicolis said:

My first fossil that i ever found was a beautiful brachiopod that i found while hiking in poland at the age of 4. Sadly it was stolen in kindergarten, and it was never Seen again...

Thats sad. Its not an nice feeling to loose something you found at that age. 

 

No self collected ones. All my fossil hunt trips always got cancelled, this years one too. Maybe some other year.

 

My first ones were these four, but it was mosasaur teeth I was looking for. So I was more happy about T. atrox and M. beaugei teeth. Since I saw some as a child, but could not get any, so I tried again as an adult.

[Coco]

The first time I brought home a fossil I was still in school. In front of my school I found a limestone rock with ... a shell print.

 

Later, while hiking, I stopped on a pile of "falun" (Miocene shell sand) and found shark teeth. They were certainly my first fossils in my collection, but it is so old that do not know exactly where are these...

 

Coco

Edited February 18 by Coco

[Kane]

I was 7 years old on the shoreline of the Ottawa River behind the Parliament Buildings when there was still natural shoreline shales (since covered in riprap to prevent erosion). I found a very large pygidium of the trilobite Pseudogygites latimarginatus. Being a bit young for tools, I would simply bash the shales against sturdier rocks to split them. I came away with my prize, but not before paying the price of a mis-strike that bashed my thumb, causing me to lose the thumbnail and wait until a new one grew back. 

[vincentB]

A belemnite in a flintstone matrix  was the first fossil i found in the  early 70s.  The flintstone was used for making/ filling out  some roads in our village. 

 

 

Edited February 18 by vincentB

[Mark Kmiecik]

Halysites coral on the shoreline of Lake Michigan. Glacial erratic, I think.

[trilobites_are_awesome]

Coral and shell prints.

[Brian James Maguire]

My first fossil was this crinoid block

[Ludwigia]

I'm pretty sure this wasn't exactly the first one, since the others from way back when have been lost to posterity. But it's pretty close I think. I remember dangling on a rope strapped around a tree and tied to my waist in order to let me down the cliff where this Orthosphinctes ammonite was exposed. That was back in 1990 when I was still at the age where I was willing to do adventurous things and take a few risks. Those days are long gone I had been collecting minerals up to that point until a friend of mine invited me to join his excursion.

 

 

[Kane]

16 minutes ago, Ludwigia said:

That was back in 1990 when I was still at the age where I was willing to do adventurous things and take a few risks. Those days are long gone

Can I admit that this part of the story makes me a little sad, despite an acknowledgement of the natural way of things?

[hadrosauridae]

My first is long since lost to the depths of time and probably thrown away by a parent at some point.  It was probably a bivalve or bit of crinoid hash in limestone.  During school breaks in the summer, my father used to take me with him on his route of checking electrical power sub-stations.  They all used crushed limestone to line the drives, so my earliest memories were of patrolling those gravels while my father worked.  

My first "wild" find (as an early teenager) was a local discovery, what I thought to be a sliver of petrified wood.  I recently figured out that it was actually a piece of Permian era fossil bone.  This one has also been lost over the years. 

The first thing found that is in my current collection, was a section of Triceratops rib from the Hell creek.  Found with my son on his first fossil hunt.

 

[Bobby Rico]

Properly one of my favourite Hash Plate and first fossil I found.

This hash plate was found it in a river in Wales Uk when I was 15 and on a school trip . The teachers tried to claim it for himself but I was not having it. It reminded me of the The Nazca Lines , Nazca Desert, in southern Peru.

 

[Darktooth]

My first fossil was a small rock with shell impressions and one tiny bivalve stuck to it. I found it in my backyard when I was a kid. I thought I was rich, thinking that since it was millions of years old it had to be worth something.

I am glad that I now know fossils true value exceeds monetary value.

[Lone Hunter]

Dug up this 7 lb Eopachydiscus while planting bushes in former house about 20 yrs ago, thought it was a Nautilus at the time.  This led to meeting my mentor @bone2stone and my fossil obsession.

[Yoda]

I haven’t been out much. 
Certainly not as often as I would like. 
But this is one of the specimens on my first collecting trip 

Carboniferous fern leaf 

 

 

[Echinoid Express]

The details of my early days of fossil collecting are dubious at best, but a lot of my earliest interest beyond cool dinosaur toys at the age of six or seven originated from my grandfather, who was a jack-of-all-trades and a tinkerer. He enjoyed topics of science and the likes, and he often collected random rocks and crystals from all over. I remember him giving me what I believed for ages to be my first "fossil", a chunk of concrete with a square pattern on a smooth flat surface; he said it was a turtle shell fragment. From there he would send me things he got from mail order cards sent in with magazines such as National Geographic or perhaps TV programs, which are arguably some of the very first actual fossils I had.

 

This was one, a geologic timeline card made in the 90's, with some small samples from different places glued to it.

 

 

And later he would give me a neat collection of Texas fossils, which I figure he got long before I came along, as the packaging was in a worn state when I got it.

 

 

 

While in second grade, either the NC Museum of Natural Sciences or the NC Fossil Club came and brought a bunch of things to share. I believe this is where this Glossus steinkern came from. My older brother a couple of years prior had gotten one as well, along with some Lee Creek Mine micro matrix, which I had held hostage for many years before finally returning it to him just last year once I rediscovered it! He is not into fossils the same as I am, but I enjoy sending him a neat thing or two from my travels now and then.

 

 

Now, as for my actual first fossil found, it's really hard to say the exact one or time, but these are a few I collected in my childhood from family vacations at Holden Beach, NC, as well as some from Oak island, NC. My grandmothers and my mother all got me into modern shell collecting early on as well, and the fun part of these beaches was the fact that these fossils would show up on occasion amongst the shells. These include several almost whole Hardouinia mortonis echinoids, a bunch of broken ones, bryozoans, and Exogyra oysters from the Late Cretaceous Peedee Formation (as early as 2001), a bone fragment and a sirenian skull cap from what I believe to be the Miocene (~2011), and several fossil shells probably from the Waccamaw Formation that I found amongst modern shell piles (somewhere between 2001-2005). I only recently discovered I had found these Pleistocene shells as a child, and it was all thanks to the cone snail, Conasprella adversaria, which is an extinct giveaway! The echinoid I've got by itself in a picture is definitely one of my earlier ones, as well as the broken reddish one in the center of the group shot with the holes in it. The really nice one in the bottom center of the group shot was not mine, but my younger brothers (which I borrowed), and it was the source of envy for many years (~2011). He also found a gorgeous small, black and dark orange Carcharodon carcharias tooth that same trip.

 

 

 

The problem as a child that I had was being extremely picky about my collection; if it wasn't perfect or my own find, I often times neglected it. Thus, many of these had been stuffed into jars with modern shells, and my grandfather's gifts just gathered dust on a shelf, for nearly two decades. However, getting into the hobby in a much greater strength, as well as having a more mature mentality, has helped me to see the beauty and personal worth of these finds! I plan on making a special display of sorts with them in the near future.

[patelinho7]

My very first was a single shark tooth from Calvert Cliffs. It was the only thing I found that trip, and I promptly dropped it in my neighbor's lawn while showing my friend and it was gone  until I went back to the Cliffs to realize how many teeth could be found once I had the eye for it.

[rocket]

I was around 6 or 7 when I found the first fossil I can remember to. Grow up in a region with old coal mines and found carboniferous plants on an old spoil tip. Long long ago...

[vincentB]

On April 5 and May 10, 1975, during the broadcasts of the youth program "Stuif's In" by members of the DJO Foundation (The Young Researchers), fossils from an outcrop in Misté were shown on TV. This turned out to be a great success and attracted a lot of interest, especially from young people who were interested in such very "old shells". I still have these sifted fossils in my possession. I was 15 years old.

[Missourian]

As a kid, I found this Favosites sp. on the shore of Truman Reservoir, Missouri:

 

 

I first thought it was a petrified wasp nest

[MarcoSr]

My first two fossils were two megs that I found diving off the beach at Governors Run, Maryland in 1974.  I went with my dive club for a fossil dive in the winter of 1974.  I hadn't collected fossils before, and really only went on the dive trip because I liked diving and the drinking afterward.  There were probably a dozen of us for that trip, and absolutely no vertebrate fossils were found.  The underwater area near the beach was a sandpit for the dive, and with so many divers in a small area, the visibility became near zero very quickly.  Some of the divers picked up a few shells, but I wasn't really interested in them at the time.  The general store right by the beach had a really nice fossil display which included several really nice big megs and I wanted to find one of them.  Although not advisable at all, I went back to Governor Run a few weeks later with my wife for a solo dive because I wanted to find a meg.  The conditions for the dive were much better than that first dive, with a lot of the underwater sand gone with clay bottom.  I found two megs on that dive (The two larger megs, center and right, in the riker mount picture below).  That dive trip was the beginning of a 50-year obsession with fossil collecting for me.  Also below is a picture of me in my wetsuit before that dive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marco Sr.

[Bjohn170]

25 minutes ago, MarcoSr said:

My first two fossils were two megs that I found diving off the beach at Governors Run, Maryland in 1974.  I went with my dive club for a fossil dive in the winter of 1974.  I hadn't collected fossils before, and really only went on the dive trip because I liked diving and the drinking afterward.  There were probably a dozen of us for that trip, and absolutely no vertebrate fossils were found.  The underwater area near the beach was a sandpit for the dive, and with so many divers in a small area, the visibility became near zero very quickly.  Some of the divers picked up a few shells, but I wasn't really interested in them at the time.  The general store right by the beach had a really nice fossil display which included several really nice big megs and I wanted to find one of them.  Although not advisable at all, I went back to Governor Run a few weeks later with my wife for a solo dive because I wanted to find a meg.  The conditions for the dive were much better than that first dive, with a lot of the underwater sand gone with clay bottom.  I found two megs on that dive (The two larger megs, center and right, in the riker mount picture below).  That dive trip was the beginning of a 50-year obsession with fossil collecting for me.  Also below is a picture of me in my wetsuit before that dive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Marco Sr.

Wow I really don’t hear about many people diving for fossils along the Calvert cliffs. Awesome!

[MarcoSr]

38 minutes ago, Bjohn170 said:

Wow I really don’t hear about many people diving for fossils along the Calvert cliffs. Awesome!

 

I really didn't do many beach dives along Calvert Cliffs, maybe a dozen or so.  It was cumbersome to get my gear to and from the beach.  But mainly most times the sand completely covered the underwater areas by the beach, with clay bottom, not the norm.  Also, because of the shallow water, I got bounced around on the bottom by the wave action and boat wakes and the sand was scratching the glass on my gauges in my console and abrading my gloves and wetsuit.

 

Marco Sr.

[Tristan]

My first was a mosasaur tooth as a birthday present.