Collecting Fossils

[discovery]

Hello all been a long time! I want to know if anyone here is also interested in collecting fossils?

[GrahamL]

Hi Joel

No but I couuld see the interest in it, some of the bigger ones at a gem fest the wife and i went to last year were incredible , as was the prices.
But there were plenty of reasonably priced and intersting specimums on offer to.

[AdrianF]

Yes my wife, Margaret, and I are interested in fossils.
Margaret had a display at Brisbane Museum of a set of fossils she found in 1986ish even had a letter from the head fossil guy at Brisbane Museum explaining the fossils had never been recorded in the area before :). We still have samples of the fossils. Recently we went to Hughenden and found a few fossils. I will see if I can post some pictures when I get home tonight.

Adrian

[jjjnettie]

My Mum has always had an interest in fossils and rocks in general, she's passed it on to me.
I have a couple of small slabs that are full of fossils that I bought very cheaply at the markets.
When out camping once I found a rock with a very clear outline of a fern embedded in it.
Mum has a very clear shard of rock, can't be quartz, 5" tall, Dad found it. It has a clump of fine straw coloured grass in it as well as a fossilized fly.

[supernova1965]

These are some Fossils that my wife and I found in an old underwater reef on the surface of the ground. They are in the Mt Britton area west of Mackay.

[seanliddelow]

I bought a collection of fossils from America the largest being a large unidentified rib bone about 20cms long. We also got some wood from the petriefied forest.

[Ian Robinson]

Been there done that.

A great place to collect exquisitly preserved fossilised leaves and twigs and bits of petrofied wood that's probably a well kept secret is the shale stone outcrops overlooking The Soldiers' Pool here at Newcastle and the scree field under the cliff just north of Susan Gillmore Beach.

[FredSnerd]

I don't collect fossils but my wife says she does.

[BerrieK]

We have a few very intresting pieces, one of which is a complete fossilised crab, about 20cm in length. My son's favorite piece of ours is a chunk of fossilised wood. My kids also love looking for treasures in amber.

My dad has a fantastic rock and fossil collection that my sister and I used to paw all over when we were kids (almost long enough ago to be fossils ourselves, it seems!).

Has anyone got any opalised fossils? They truly are a sight to behold. Amazingly beautiful.

There are so many great places in Australia that you can go to see fossils, both 'in the wild' and in beautifully presented collections. One very exciting project that is underway at the moment at Lightening Ridge can be found here : http://www.australianopalcentre.com/index.php

Yes it's a bit of a plug - my sister is a paleontologist who is involved in the project. Well worth supporting and having a look.

Kerrie :)

[FredSnerd]

Kerrie,

I thought a paleontologist was just a profession they made up for that famous American SitCom. I didnt think they actually existed.

[BerrieK]

They're real all right! Either that or Jen (my sister) is an ASIO spy living in Lightening Ridge (with her friends) who is using it as a convenient cover! Nah. She's a paleo all right.

Kerrie

[FredSnerd]

I saw this Get Smart episode once where Max and 99 cornered the Chinese spies at the dry cleaning place, to which one spy said "The spy rings just a front. The real money's in the laundry". So I think you might need to question Jen just a bit more about this so called, you know, "palaeontology" profession she talks about.

[renormalised]

That's one of the things that got me into Geology...fossils. Being a geo' I keep my eye out for any interesting places when I go bush. I've collected quite a few fossils in my time...corals, bits of lycopods Glossopteris and tree ferns, nautiloids, brachiopods, crabs and prawns, fish etc. I can take you to some out of the way places not many people know about:D

If you like the big stuff, not more than 100 miles from home there are Diprotodon, Procoptodon, Thylacoleo and other fossils...mostly Dip's, though, and about 250km NW there's Megalania and snake fossils.

[AstralTraveller]

I've only got a piece of tetracoral I brought back from a geo field trip and a fulgurite (which is not a fossil) I found one day at Jervis Bay. Other than that I just look at the ones at work.

[dpastern]

I've got a bunch of fossils somewhere, packed away...my dad used to work with a guy who used to go fossil hunting. I never got any Trilobite ones though :(

Dave

[AdrianF]

This is one we found near Hughenden last year. Its about 85mm long.
When I get the other fossils out I will post pictures of them as well.
Somewhere packed away we also have part of a leg(?) bone from some dinosaur.

Adrian

[renormalised]

Nice little ammonite:D:D

[Ric]

As an ex geo I have more than a passing interest in fossils and enjoy fossicking when I get the chance (not as often as I would like to).

Over the years I have built up quite a nice collection of ammonites and trilobites as well as some small fish and ferns. there is also a few purchased ones as well in the way of sharks teeth and some early mammal bones.

Cheers

[Astrobserver99]

There are a lot of graptolites and brachiopods close to Melbourne if you know where to look. Also, Monash have a regular summertime dig at Inverloch collecting Dinosaur Bones etc. When I was in WA, we collected some huge ammonites about half a metre across. Lots of other marine fossils also.

[renormalised]

I'd like to get a Megalodon tooth or two...that would be spicky!!!!:D:D

[AstralTraveller]

You could use it as a door-stop. :D

Or hafted onto a shaft it would make a great "prehistoric" weapon. :fight:

[renormalised]

Better yet, have a Megalodon jaw as your door!!!!. Have the full set of teeth mounted in the jaw and when someone like a door to door salesperson comes around annoying you, snap it shut!!!!:P:P:D:D

[discovery]

It's good to see the interest in prehistory is alive and well, The only specimens I have collected my self are some devonian lycopods so I have had to resort to the silver pick and out source for the ones I want this might be blasphemy but I am about to pay four times as much as my scope cost me for some great specimens from america including an entire juvenile ankylosaur articulated foot I'll post pics as I get them, I have a partial chevron from hell creek montana also half a T rex tooth I'll send pics of those also, it gets so addictive once you start collecting

[UK1]

With all this poor weather we are having seems easier to find fossills than stars at the moment

[mill]

Go to a star party and you will find all the fossils you need :rofl::rofl::rofl::einstein:

[OneOfOne]

I haven't found any of my fossils myself, but I have a few dinosaur teeth (Spinosaurus, Triceratops, Hadrosaur etc), Hadrosaur egg, trilobite...oh, and some dinosaur poo!

[FredSnerd]

Its solid poo by now right?

[sjastro]

A fossil from my uncle geophysicist.

Is this an ammonite?

[DavidU]

My sister bought a house from a paleontologist and there is a sink bench top he had made is about 1meter square and is like green/grey polished stone (like marble) but looking into it, it is full of small bones, teeth and vertebra.
I must get a pic.

[seanliddelow]

yes that is an ammonite:thumbsup:

[renormalised]

Coprolite = fossil feces:D:D

[sjastro]

Thanks Sean.

Steven

[AstralTraveller]

There is more interest in geology on this forum than I expected. If you do like such things and you are in Wollongong you could do worse than visit the uni and go the first floor foyer of Building 41. There you will find the Howard Worner Collection.

http://www.uow.edu.au/science/eesc/Collections/index.html

There are also a few other cases with some nice bits and pieces (eg crinoids, a 30cm ammonite). If you give me some notice I might be able to show you a few other things. We could certainly look through the main teaching lab (unless there is a class in there) but the displays there are mostly functional (different symmetry groups, colour vs streak, lustre, habit, simple and complex twinning etc). If we're real nice to the curator she might show you some of the stuff that we can't display yet (eg she recently got a pair of the biggest trilobites I've ever seen). Our curator is pretty good and a fanatical collector, for us and for her own collection. See below (don't take Paul's use of 'we' too seriously - Penny does 95% of the work)

http://www.uow.edu.au/content/groups/public/@web/@sci/@eesc/documents/doc/uow067333.pdf

One day we might get the Hobbit stuff housed too (I've held a full reproduction - internal and external - of the cranium in my hands :D).

BTW if you are a real tech-head I can show a collection of pricy beige boxes, and tell you which ones are - and are not - in my good books at the moment :confuse3:.

[seeker372011]

well this thread just goes to show how many of us are fascinated with fossils..

[renormalised]

It also helps that a few of us here are Geologists:D:D

[seanliddelow]

Have you seen the " From the Earth to the Moon' series? Theres an episode about Apollo 15 and lunar geology on there.:thumbsup:

[renormalised]

No, I haven't, actually. Might have to buy it:D

[discovery]

I have another fossil on the way from a brachylophosaur a rare hadrosaur, I will post pics my living is starting to look like the smithsoinian!:lol:

[OneOfOne]

Looks very much like a rock....kids just LOVE it when I tell them what they are holding :lol: