Off we go!
For a day at an ancient Devonian (3,000,000 year old) beach!!
Any other fossil buffs on the forum?
I’ll post some of the finds we make soon.
Podzol, yes. I love looking for fossils on the beach and always have done. My house has a very large proportion of stones in it.
I don’t know anything about them, I just like colllecting them. I think my 7 year old son will follow in my footsteps.
Unfortunately at the moment I don’t live within reasonable distance of any good fossil beaches although some can be found on the local beach and I always look if we go walking there.
Cathy
One of my favorite things to do while in high school was looking for fossilized sharks teeth on the beach of the Chesapeake Bay. Now twenty-five years later, I only have a couple nice ones left.
I did a big collection trip in college out in Ohio and Indiana- mostly brachiopods, I believe. I still have a few nice ones around. I also used to find nautilus-like shells in the rocks around the southern part of lake Champlain in New York and Vermont.
Hi Folks,
Back from a great adventure!
Here is a link that discusses the site where we were.
We (my 6-year old son and I) had been up on the outcrop for only about half an hour when and the official site manager came out to greet us. He was so helpful he coached us for about an hour on what parts of the outcrop to look for what kinds of fossils and best ways to split rocks. My kid is a bad-a$$ with a pick axe ;).
We then got a personal tour of the site museum and their paleontology lab, then we went back to the site for the rest of the afternoon and got some more fossils. I may be able to volunteer with the fine excavattion of fossils!
The ones we found need some cleaning up, I’ll post some pics soon. I was wrong about the age it is 300 million years, not 3 million. We found many fish scales, fish teeth, and bony spines from plated fish andsome of the first 4-legged creatures from north America. Also many tree leaves from some of the first “tree” (tall with a woody bole).
Nothing like rolling up the sleeves for a good day in the sun in Mid Novermber, eh! Next time I’ll bring two thermoses (thermii?) of coffee and dig until dark!
Glad to hear there are other one-wheeled fossil buffs out there!
Blake
I enjoy finding beach glass (sand-polished bits of glass) on the beaches around the local harbors… some old salts are in the habit of tossing their bottles overboard and some years later they wash up on shore in small pieces.
Well, there’s Harper…
…oh, I thought you asked “any other fossils on the forum?”
Another really nice thing to collect is cowrie shells. They are only found on some of the beaches in the UK and where we go camping, Shell Island, they are tiny and pretty. There aren’t very many of them but one of the most relaxing things I have ever done is sitting, glass of wine in one hand and sifting throught the pebbles and sand to find cowrie shells. An hour will find about 10, depending on the time of year.
Then I bring them home and put them in my fish tank.
Cathy
I live a mile from Lester Park outside of Saratoga Springs. It’s the site of an ancient shallow sea - I have a rock which used to be a plant; it’s a half-billion years old.
ooohh aaaahhh