Monday, March 15, 2010

Making Money on Microfossils

A friend sent me an e-mail the other day with a link to the Indiana9fossils website microfossil section.  I looked at those prices and said "YIKES!"

It shows a number of Devonian period condonts from the Vernon Limestone of Indiana.  Notice the pictures of the Hibbarella sp and Polygnathus cristatus  condonts and the compare them to the pictures on D&D Fossil site in the United Kingdom.  Well I do declare, it looks like the picture labeled Polygnathus from the New Albany Shale is the same.  The condont labeled Hibbarella has the same picture as well.  Hope everybody is cool with the copyrights on these images since both are commercial ventures.

The fossils on the Indiana9fossil site are being sold at $10 a piece while D&D Fossil is selling a capsule to small bag of mixed fossils for $10. So it appears if you want to save money buy the container and use the nice ID card to determine what fossils you have.

There appears to be some difference as to what layer these fossils are from while one site says Vernon Limestone and the other New Albany Shale but the file name shows Beechwood.  It looks like the ID sheet shows them from either New Albany Shale or Beechwood Limestone.  Speed, Indiana is a quarry/concrete plant so it would be interesting who provided this material from the quarry and then who dissolved it in acid to get extract the fossils.  I have not e-mailed anyone at either dealer site to ask any questions.  This set of fossils origin make for a good mystery. Delve some more into to the microfossil sections of both sites and more overlapping fossils will be found.

The net margin is pretty good if a bag yields 10-20 fossils that can be sold for $10 a piece. Of course, they need to be identified, packaged and shipped.

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