There are many pictorial guides intended for the identification of fossils and some of them focus on specimens from a particular place or time. This does both. The image at right, in shades of blue, shows the location of the four geologic series in North-Central Texas. Deposits in those areas contain an abundance of marine fossils from the Pennsylvanian Sub-period.  This website will help amateurs and professionals recognize the subtle distinctions that identify different species and provide up-to-date information about them when used in conjunction with an associated fauna list/spreadsheet.  Since this effort falls under the umbrella of the Dallas Paleontological Society there will always be someone dedicated to keeping it current. Names change and new species are often discovered so this fluidity is crucial to providing useful information. To aid in keeping this a dynamic resource we encourage anyone who accesses it to inform the Dallas Paleontological Society of any updates we can make to keep it current. 

This combined resource was made possible through the efforts of Mike DeBrock, Mark McKinzie, Dr. Ben Neuman, Dr. Tom Yancey, Dr. Merlynd Nestell, John McLeod, Joshua Hanley, Bob Williams, Dr. Peter Holterhoff, and Rodney Wise. 

History

In July of 2017 a group of DPS members decided to organize the Texas-Pennsylvanian Study Group and by November we held our first meeting. One of our goals was to build our own fossil field guide and initially that effort was taken on by Dr. Ben Neuman of Texas A&M. His "Pictorial Guide..." was very useful and comprehensive but relied on simple images from original papers without anything for scale and with some obsolete names.

The creation of this website was an obvious extension of another project, to assemble a fauna list for perhaps the best-known collecting site in Texas for fossils of this age, located at  Lost Creek Lake in Jacksboro. A conversation with Mike DeBrock about the most complete list available at the time revealed how much material was missing from that list. We  had also heard about upcoming nomenclature changes in some taxa. Within a couple of weeks Mike had version 1 of the spreadsheet ready to edit.   Images are provided in galleries of fossils under the "Galleries" links below.  Mike has plans to assemble similar lists for the other Pennsylvanian geologic formations or perhaps other collecting sites in Texas so this website will contain images of those species as well.