Florrisant fossil beds

[Quicksilver]

Found while looking for dinosaurs, from the Florrisant beds. Part of the leaf still there

[Lone Star]

Very cool.

[KyChipStone]

Very nice

[smbore]

sweet.

[oldrocks2]

Nice, well preserved.

[Hal Gorges]

Florida certainly has some supreme fossils that’s cool

[WAH]

Nice find

[CMD]

Nice score!

[oldrocks2]

Florrisant beds in Colorado ?

[Quicksilver]

Yep, on the western side of the park. A guy would let you come on for pay and look on his property. They got to keep the rare stuff. Somebody the year before had found a bird. They kept it.

[SDhunter]

Pretty nice fossil

[SevenOut]

No Dinosaurs at the Florissant Fossil Beds. Florissant Fossil Beds are Eocene age. Dinosaurs went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous about 30,000,000 years, or so, earlier. I use to go to the original quarry in 1965 when it was a privately owned quarry. Then it was purchased by the U S Park Service as a National Monument and no longer a place to collect. The quarry to the north of the original quarry the would charge you a flat price for a box of shale you could split to find insects and plant fossils. Along the highway are great exposures, but the Highway Department put up signs that you cannot collect along the highway.

In my article I had said Oligocene Epoch. Compromise as Late Eocene. I am not sure what the official word is today. The fossil teeth I found are Oligocene White River Formation (like the Big Badlands of South Dakota).

Just South of the National Monument there are some Oligocene bad land exposures I found a Mesohippus (Horse) molar and a Probotherium molar (Camel) next to the highway.

I wrote an article. My girlfriend was sitting on the top of the quarry. Cost to dig was $2 admission to the quarry... for all you wanted to dig.

[Quicksilver]

Great research. At the time my dino search was confined to ghost ranch chinle formation. I was cruising around looking for out crops and found the adjacent quarry you mentioned. It was 35$ to look then and they got to cherry pick. I think they may be closed now.

[CMD]

Found while looking for dinosaurs, from the Florrisant beds. Part of the leaf still there

I see the little patch of brown at what would be the leaf’s tip. But you are not saying that part is actual unfossilized dry leaf, are you? I must be misreading what you’re saying?

[Quicksilver]

Yep, some of the fossils are imprints with the organic carbon still in place. They more than likely have a high silica content. I had a partial leaf from here that had the leaf fall off the surface when I opened it. The site owner said twigs were found in the matrix also. Just a carbon and silica structure I guess. The brown you see is where a leaf piece fell off when I was messing with it. It used to be whole. The quarry owner said they had found a bird a few years back valued at 10k$. So they got first pick on what you found. I have no idea the condition of the bird. I did see a pict of it sandwiched between the tuff. it was not a flat fossil it had structure.

[CMD]

Yes, most of those pay sites are not going to let you walk off with an extreme rarity….