Fossils

    While Mason County is well known for its local fossils which are very numerous in the limestone shales throughout the area, we have in the gallery extraordinary fossils from two very different parts of Africa. Amazing pairs of Opalised Ammonites from Madagascar which date back to the Cretaceous period of approximately 100 million years ago.

    Fossil hunters who know trilobites and crinoids will be amazed by the specimens we have from the Atlas mountains of Morocco, which date back to the Devonian period of 350-400 million years ago.

    This year we were able to obtain some wonderfully affordable ancient fish fossils from the oceans of Wyoming!

    We only get to buy our fossils direct from diggers in Africa once a year so our inventory, once gone, is not re-stocked until February.

Trilobites ("three-lobes") are extinct arthropods that form the class Trilobita. They appeared in the Early Cambrian period and flourished throughout the lower Paleozoic era before beginning a drawn-out decline to extinction when, during the Late Devonian extinction, all trilobite orders, with the sole exception of Proetida, died out. The last of the trilobites disappeared in the mass extinction at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago