New to amateur paleontology, looking for IDing resourses

[Mark Thornton]

Hi, my son is interested in paleontology, thus we are looking for resources for helping to identify any fossils we stumble across. I plan pretty soon to look into the local universities, we have a copy of Audubon's fossils of NA and google. But for things we cannot identify readily, is this a forum or is there a good forum where I could upload a photo to a community of helpful experienced/educated people who would be interested in giving some help to a newby?

Thanks,
Mark (B.S. - plant bio, D.O.)

[jillery]

There are usually several amateur organizations associated with
natural history museums and significant fossil sites.

[erik simpson]

This forum used to be a good resource for interested amateurs, but in recent years it's been overrun by cranks, spam, and convoluted squabbling that may start with an interesting post, but rapidly devolves into semantic triviality.

Good luck finding some good info about your local fossil possibilities. Fossils are where you find them, but it generally isn't easy unless you have a pretty good idea of what sorts of places are likely to have them.

[John Harshman]

This newsgroup is mostly dead. The best thing to do is to find a local
paleontologist. If there are any at nearby universities, that's your
best shot. If you're serious and have lots of money, the Treatise on
Invertebrate Paleontlogy comes in handy.

[Ruben]

On Mon, 04 Mar 2013 10:25:37 -0800, John Harshman wrote:

> This newsgroup is mostly dead

why?

[John Harshman]

Are you asking for the cause or for the evidence that it's dead? In the
second case, note that there is very little traffic, much of it spam. In
the first case, usenet as a whole is slowly dying, as most people move
to blogs and such, and sci.bio.paleontology was never a high-traffic
group to begin with.