How do you collect fossils?

[Chimera778]

I have a few, a fern, a few trilobites and shellfish, some I don't remember what they are.  But my question to you is this:  How do you collect yours?  Do you buy them, or so you go out and find them yourself?  Are there any places out in the western US where you can go and dig for dinosaur fossils? 

[fleshanthos]

Finding fossils is something called Serendipity. You have to spend hours under the hot sun, on your knees, nose close to the ground. Keep searching rock after rock. You decide how fast will be your progress, but some trilobites are small, and tough to find by going fast. I often find only parts of shells - there are many more shell fragments than whole dead bodies to find of them.
It is super super rare to crack open a rock and have a perfect, full bodied trilobite or ammonite right there looking up at you happy as you please.

As for dinosaur material, go look on youtube about what it's like to be on a dig. You often have to pay to try it out. There are worse ways to spend a vacation! If you just drive out into the desert and start digging, you are very probably breaking some laws. You might even find some interesting bones, but you will have removed them from their context, and possibly from their still underground skeleton.
It's alot more complex of a problem than people realize.

One last note: remember to be DAMN careful wherever you do collect. Be careful about walking along loosely packed sediments, especially if you're more than 6' up a ridge. You CAN fall off. Wear a hardhat if you are anywhere near a position that rocks can roll downhill to your position. If you hear bits of rock and pebbles sliding and falling, it's probably not worth it to collect there. Can't do much with a fossil when you're squished under a boulder. Use your head and minimize the risks.

[Roktman]

Nearly all of my fossil collection I've bought. There are certain places in western NJ that have Triassic  sediments on the top, but it's still a long day for a few fossils.
Much easier to just buy. 

[Ikessauro]

Nearly all of my fossil collection I've bought. There are certain places in western NJ that have Triassic  sediments on the top, but it's still a long day for a few fossils.
Much easier to just buy. 

I personally only collect replicas or casts because fossil dealing is illegal in Brazil; But I guess that there's not a way to buy the feeling or experience you get when you find a cool fossil yourself. There will always be a story to tell about it much more interesting than just "I bought it". Anyway, I'm not encouraging fossil hunting, as has been said before, you could potentially ruin important specimens or get yourself in trouble or even hurt yourself doing it without the proper knowledge.

[amargasaurus cazaui]

I generally hunt and find all of my fossils. I locate them using a very careful ebay search, stalk them and then sneak in and using a very secure safe internet connection I bid quickly. I usually wear comfortable clothing, take plenty of soft drinks and use a movie in the background to keep me centered on the daunting task at hand. Aside from that having a little fore knowledge of what you are looking for, and what is likely and what is not helps. If someone for instance is selling a complete fossil dinosaur for a hundred dollars, it is more likely a fake. If someone offers you a dinosaur egg uncovered at their secret dig site in central kansas, it is likely not an egg.A little self education goes a vast distance once you are in the internet field collecting specimens.
  The trick is to decide what type of fossils you are wanting to collect. If you are wanting petrified wood it can be generally found in almost every place you look. For dinosaurs and older animals there are specific places where the strata are favorable for collecting. If you are wanting to find ocean or seagoing animals you wish to search for marine depositional areas. As I tend to collect dinosaur fossils and live in kansas, I am mostly relegated to purchasing.

[fleshanthos]

It's also important to consider that people already LIVING near a fossil rich area have the spare time to go out and hunt fossils as an income supplement or a living - don't forget a Rock Hound collects not only fossils, but minerals too - whatever will bring them a $.
So they spend a few hours in the field after the shop closes or else during the slow season with no tourists. They bring back a haul, some % of which is the material WE want; for example, I live in a Trilobite area that interests me .1% * dinosaur fossil interest!
You and I have no way of the rock hound life since we don't LIVE there!

Best way to hunt is probably eVilBay. Supplement it with local excursions when you can, but I was dropped from a semi-pro one I'd been saving $ for, likely due to political reasons (living in Quebec Canada).

[Mellow Stego]

All my fossils have been purchases sadly.
I would love to go out find some on my own.

[Shonisaurus]

I bought the fossils in their day (bones of edmontosaurus) from the Natural Sciences Museum of Madrid and also fossils of prehistoric marine reptiles. As for invertebrates some of the fossils I bought them from the aforementioned Store and others I bought them from reputable stores in my nation.

[Newt]

Most areas have rock and mineral clubs that could help point you in the right direction to find fossils locally; they will know the best sites and the relevant rules. If there is a university with a geology department in your area, they can be a great resource, and may even let you tag along on collecting trips.


You can also glean quite a bit of info from scientific papers; try searching Google Scholar with keywords "fossil" and the name of a county, town, or local geographic feature. The paper may include precise localities or merely the name of a formation; you can find where this formation is exposed by looking at regional geologic maps.



Where I live, in middle Tennessee, Ordovician to Mississippian marine fossils are extremely abundant. There are no laws controlling collection so long as you have permission from the landowner. Crinoids, rugose corals, brachiopods, and bryozoans are the ones I find most often; gastropods and sea urchins are a bit harder to find. I've never collected any fossil arthropods or vertebrates here, though I know they exist. There are Mesozoic and Tertiary deposits within easy day trip distance of me.


I would guess similar resources exist where you live. You may not be able to find "exciting" megafauna remains, but fossil shells and leaves are pretty cool in their own right. Of course there's nothing wrong with buying fossils, but ones you've collected yourself have a special sort of appeal.

[Totoro]

I have a few purchased fossils, but they are mostly given to me as gifts.  All the rest (thousands!) I have collected from my "travels" around the country. 

I was lucky to grow up in Illinois, which had some amazing old Carboniferous deposits.  I made a couple trips to Mazon Creek and have an awesome fern fossil I got as a kid from there.  One of my favorite things.  My college work in Illinois, Missouri and finally Texas all brought me to places with different kinds of old rock and fossil exploring opportunities.  I used the Roadside Geology books and local fossil guides to point me to where I could collect legally.  Then, it's just looking down, and often you find things. 

Texas was really awesome.  You could travel to different places (Big Bend, etc.) or different road cuts as you traverse the state to find slices through different Eras, so in one place you found crinoids, and another shells, and another glyptdon scutes or early horse teeth.  A couple of my best finds included two large mammoth molars found washed up on two different beaches after storms at sea.  I did my doctoral research on rare shorebirds, so I was always walking or driving an ATV along the beach. 

Then, later while working for Audubon in Texas, I managed a number of coastal waterbird sanctuaries, most of which were islands formed by the creation of the Gulf Intracoastal WaterWay, and regularly maintained by dredging by the Corps.  One of them, loaded with brown pelican colonies, was also just covered with fossilized sand dollars.  Wish I'd grabbed more of those off the shores of that island before I moved up here to Portland, OR. 

Portland is horrible for fossils, sadly - all of the old rock was covered by basalt from the various shield cones and volcanoes ages ago.  But I did take a trip to the John Day area and have a stash of legally collected shale full of plant fossils.  I have a couple boxes of rocks that I plan to crack open to uncover them in a few years when I am a retired old man. 

[Justin_]

I'm in London in the UK. I went on a couple of geology field trips from school but as it was back in the '80s I can't remember the exact locations, although they were quite a distance away. I'm pretty sure that one took us close to the Severn Bridge and we were finding bivalve shells in a roadside embankment. Another was to the Isle Of Sheppey where there was a beach covered in fruits, seeds and shark teeth. I'm guessing it was here: http://www.discoveringfossils.co.uk/warden-point-isle-of-sheppey/ 
I'm not sure how much in the way of fossils have been found in the London metropolitan area itself. The Eocence geological formation called London Clay covers a much wider area and would include that Sheppey beach.

[Libraraptor]

I don´t collect fossils with aim or focus, I do not buy them, either. But whenever I encounter one, I keep it. In my area we mostly find sea lillies and other stuff from the Devonian. When I was young I occasionally bought myself a trilobite or an ammonite.  I do have some self collected Holzmaden ammonites, too.

[Totoro]

The talk about trilobite fossils reminds me of a rock that made up part of a garden perimeter, I believe, at the first home I lived in as a boy through about age 8.  That rock, about 8" wide, had a nice trilobite fossil (maybe it was a crappy one and just improves with age in my memory), but I never grabbed it when we moved to a new house, so it's lost to me.  I always regretted not collecting that one that was right there for the taking!   

[EmmaLVV]

I've managed to find some, one of which was literally in my back garden! I've only bought one fossil (a Mosasaurus tooth), but I'd love to find some at Beachy Head one day.

[JayDavid9]

If only we could find some in our back garden! We've got lucky when traveling and planned out some stops on road trips to different sites and that's how I'd prefer to collect mine but it's few and far between. Because my boy didn't want to wait we ended up picking up a few fossil packs and pieces from on online vendor https://www.fossilicious.com/dinosaur-fossils/ he loves them!

[Bowhead Whale]

I own only one fossil. A trilobite. And I had to buy it...