A Photographic Fossil Hunt At Lake Texoma - 9-19-15

[enoscrawler]

I love texoma was camping down there for the eclipse(blood moon) my daughter found a gryphea bigger than her hand the ammos are hard to find on the OK side

[DinoMike]

Just got back from talking to the ranger at the lake office. Apparently there IS no collecting permit process. There is no permit. I got the feeling from the tone of the conversation that their staff archaeologist wishes that individual collectors would just go away.

(Yes, archaeologist, according to the ranger on duty.)

Anyway, this is potentially more trouble than it's worth for me. I'm just gonna stick to Dallas Paleo trips to Texoma & try to find another non-USACE-managed Duck Creek formation exposure to hunt on my own.

(As an aside, the fossil display at the lake office is AWESOME!)

So, technically, you are supposed to get a collecting permit for collection of invertebrates on Army Corps of Engineers land (vertebrate fossils are required to be turned in at the Corps office unless they are collected by a museum). That being said, this regulation is not heavily (read "at all") enforced at the lakes here. Spillways are a different story but lake shores are a nonissue for them.

If you want to follow the letter of the law (as we all should), the collecting permit is an easy 5 minute process at the local Corps office where you want to collect.

When I was working with the USACE and the Perot during the collection of Flexomornis, we took the local corps manager out to the site to show him the bones and his response was... "You guys really want this stuff?"

Edited October 26, 2015 by DinoMike