We love fossils, and we put more emphasis on finding them than buying them. If you also love fossils and pick up them up wherever you go, and then wonder about them, this is the place for you!

We welcome guests and new members at our monthly meetings on the third Tuesday of the month at 7:30pm. Meetings are usually hybrid -both in-person and remote – via Zoom. It’s better in person because you can look at fossils and bring in your own to show off.  Maybe you can stump the Paleontologist!

Current Section officers for the Section are President Neal Immega Ph. D. paleontologist, and Field Trip Leader and Section Representative Mike Dawkins.

We generally have a Show & Tell and a talk or a project at each meeting. We have had sessions where we learn new techniques like “coal ball peels” and making thin sections of fusulinids. We also have a holiday party (in July!). At one party we had a session where we made jewelry from inch-sized Moroccan ammonites ground to show the chambers. Lovely!

We do community outreach in several areas, giving talks for schools, libraries, Scout Geology Merit Badge programs, staffing paleo tables at our annual show, docenting at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, doing field trips for Earth Science Week, downtown building stones tours, and talks for sister rock clubs. The Paleontology Section offers a $1000 scholarship each year to a student focusing on paleontology. Click on the EDUCATION pulldown in the main menu or click on SCHOLARSHIPS for more details.

Paleo Section President Neal Immega has had great success coaching Science Olympiad students. In 2014, his teams won 1st and 7th in the nation in the High School category for Rocks and Minerals. In 2015, his teams won 1st and 10th in the nation in the Middle School category for Paleontology. See our Outreach gallery. In 2023 his team won 3rd in the nation.

We have a 1700 volume library with everything from popular books on dinosaurs to the Journal of Paleontology. An Excel spreadsheet can be found here.

We are blessed to live in Texas with its plentiful limestone deposits loaded with fossils of many kinds. There are many great locations for fossil hunting and we have field trips. You can see some of our past field trips below.

Fossils need to be identified, and the Section has written identification guides for Texas Eocene Stone City Formation, Texas Cretaceous Ammonites, Bivalves, Urchins, Gastropods, Oysters and Texas Pennsylvanian Brachiopods which you may order.  We also have described the Petrified Wood in the Herbert Zuhl Collection on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Please click on the PUBLICATIONS pulldown in the main menu or click on PALEO BOOKS to find out more.

As a Section of the Houston Gem and Mineral Society, we have access to diamond saws and grinders and torches and furnaces where we sometimes turn our finds into jewelry or bookends. After you have collected a carload of petrified wood, you HAVE to do something with it. Petrified wood is a fossil, too.

We teach how to prepare fossils in our shops. We have a dedicated air tools room with micro jackhammers (Aero and Microjack 5) and a Swamblaster micro sandblaster. Those trilobites don’t come out of shale all clean and shiny

Paleontology Section member Neal Immega says: I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and collected fossils from the Mississippian era. This meant that echinoderms were high on my list. This crinoid, from the Paint Creek Formation, at Millstadt, Illinois, died face down on the mud which was to become shale. I was 16 at the time and was most impressed by the arms on this crinoid but had no idea how to preserve it. So I tried something: I poured bio-plastic (styrene) over the fossil. I should have used epoxy, but I didn’t know that, and I certainly didn’t have any. However, 60 years later the crinoid is in perfect shape. I expected the styrene to crack and flake off, but it looks the same as when I poured it. Note the quarter for scale.

Crinoid, from the Paint Creek Formation, at Millstadt, Illinois