Because every part of the entire state of Florida was the ocean at one time! Next time you look at the tops of the trees in Florida, you can imagine water well over the very tallest parts of them, with whales and huge sharks swimming far above that!

Why don’t we find fossils everywhere if it was all underwater?

Great question! There are two primary reasons you can’t find fossils in many locations in Florida. Number 1: Often times the fossil bearing sediments are covered by sediment that does not contain many fossils. ie: sand, mud, peat. Number 2: Sometimes the fossil bearing sediments have been completely eroded away over the millions of years of fluctuating sea levels. In many locations in Florida, you will have an entire chunk of sediment, representing the record of a specific time period, missing from the geological record in a particular location! It certainly makes for a challenging puzzle to reconstruct all of the events that lead to the conditions in a specific location.

If I had the time, I’d love to share my passion with anybody and everybody that had the interest! Unfortunately, I have been swamped lately and finding the time is difficult. I would suggest purchasing a PaleoPack (basically a fossil hunt in a box, shipped to the address you choose) in my shop, or checking for availability of guided hunting trips through Fossil Voyages on Instagram or Facebook.

All over the state of Florida! We do not typically give out exact locations to the sites we film videos at in order to protect them, but also because part of the fun of fossil hunting is doing the research and exploration to find new sites yourself! I’d much rather tell you how to find sites rather than where sites are. I understand that may be frustrating to some, but many do not understand or respect just how much time, effort and days without finding a single thing goes into it before a productive site is found.

Fossils are a lifelong passion of mine! I started finding fossil sea urchins (also known as echinoids) here in Florida as a child. This interest eventually expanded into shark teeth and other vertebrate fossils. When you’re a naturally curious person, you don’t like questions to go unanswered. Every fossil I found that I was unsure of the ID on would bug me until I figured it out. This drove me into books on paleontology, websites with informative pages, obscure geological publications and eventually led to me starting my first website The Fossil Forum at 16 years old with the help of my brother in law and first serious fossil hunting partner.

The Fossil Forum exploded in growth (nearly 1,000,000 posted messages at the time of writing this) not too long after it was started, and eventually it had some very knowledgeable paleontologists contributing information on a regular basis. Because it was my website, I had to be there on a daily basis to moderate the site and also to contribute to it. I began absorbing all this information and identifying fossils for new people as they joined the website.

At 18 years old, I got certified to scuba dive for the sole purpose of finding more fossils, purchased a boat and scuba diving gear. It was at this time that I started finding thousands of fossils a week and was forced to use all the information I had learned over the years. It was at this phase that I learned the most. When you are finding, handling and identifying thousands of fossils every week, identifying all but the rarest of fossils becomes almost instantaneous.

It is a little difficult to reply to all of the messages sent to me asking for IDs and other things. I would highly recommend posting on The Fossil Forum‘s ID section. You are welcome to send me an Instagram DM or tag me in a post @paleocris.

I have plans to create a video, or a series of videos, teaching you just how I go about finding new locations, from the research I do, to the exploration of the potential sites. You can try sending me an Instagram DM, but the sheer volume of messages I get there makes it nearly impossible to reply to them all. 

I was born this way.