Stoliczkaia dispar ammonite from Hungary

Another neat fossil I received from my friend in Hungary is this Stoliczkaia dispar ammonite from Pénzesgyőr, Hungary. It was collected from Cretaceous (Aptian stage) aged rocks. It has some of the suture lines visible but the one side is a little rough.

Thank you to Karoly for the specimen!

Pyrgulifera sp. gastropod from Hungary

I made some exchanges with a friend in Hungary this summer who wanted fossil shark teeth. Below are a pics of the gastropod Pyrgulifera sp. from the Santonian stage of the Cretaceous. They were collected from old coal mines near Ajka-Csinger, Hungary. The preservation is really nice and I especially like the specimen preserved with matrix.

This specimen is loose from matrix and has some nice blue color on it. I'm not sure if the color is the result of minerals in the sediments or they are remnants of the original shell colors.

Thanks to Karoly for the specimens!

Fossil bird feathers from the Green River Fm. of Colorado

Bird feathers are somewhat rare in the fossil record but some circumstances allow them to be more easily preserved. Such is the case in the Parachute Creek member of the Green River formation. The Parachute Creek member is an oil shale that was deposited by a series of freshwater lakes in the Eocene located in northwestern Colorado and northeastern Utah. Here are some examples of the feathers that can be found within these fossil lake deposits.

Specimen #1

Specimen #2

Specimen #3

All three of the feathers look to be fairly simple and could just be down feathers. Sometimes color patterns can be preserved but I don't see any on these.

Fossil starfish and their traces

I'm showing off some starfish today starting with these Asteriacites lumbricalis from the Raethian stage of the Triassic that were found near Dijon, France. They are classified as trace fossils since they are the resting traces of starfish that later moved on. From what I can find, the theory is that the starfish burrowed into softer sediment to protect themselves when stranded during low tides. The burrows were filled in with sand once the tide came back in and the occupants crawled back into the sea. They are found from the Ordovician onwards to today.

This blog touches on these fossils briefly and has a modern example as well (scroll down about 1/2 way).
There is a brief article on Wikipedia about Asteriacites with some other pictured examples.

I have some other examples that I wrote about previously Here.

These next two fossils are legitimate starfish that both come from the famous quarries around Solenhofen, Germany. The rocks that yield these fossils are dated to the Tithonian stage of the Jurassic. Both look very similar to each other but it seems that Sinosura kelheimense has thinner arms than Ophiopetra lithographica.

Sinosura kelheimense

Ophiopetra lithographica

Thanks to Gery for the first two fossils.

Schizophoria ferronensis from the Silica Shale

Schizophoria is a genus of brachiopods that I have not personally collected much. I don't often find it in my preferred Middle Devonian outcrops and am aware of it mostly from the Upper Midwest portion of America.  This specimen comes from Milan, MI and is a Schizophoria ferronensis out of the Silica Shale (Devonian, Givetian stage). The large shells of Schizophoria can be identified by their oval outline, fine raidal ribs decorating the surface, wide but shallow sulcus and a shallow triangular dethyrium on the posterior of the pedicle valve.

Here are some other species: Schizophoria schnuri from Poland, Schizophoria iowaensis from Iowa.