Decided that we wanted to visit the Florissant Fossil Quarry in Florissant, Colorado. This is a great pay dig where you can split open 34-million old shale in search for leaf or insect fossils. Rarely there are animals which are usually kept with the quarry and provided to museum and research.

The beauty of being in a rock club is that I know the guy that coordinates field trips (lol, that’s me), so I felt it would be fun to see if anyone else in the club wanted to join us. Ended up about 10 folks showed up and we spent a couple of hours aexrracting leaf and insect fossils. I’ll definitely be doing this trip again.

I took these photos using a Celestron USB Microscope as I was looking at all of the fossils (big and small) that we uncovered. Take note that some of these are rather small; so bring a loop or magnifying glass with you on the field trip so you don’t accidentally throw out something really cool…most fossils are good size so you don’t need any magnification. For ID, there is a great site with 5000+ ID’ed fossils from this formation.