Florissant Fossil Quarry, Florissant

This business offers such a cool and rare service! For $10/hr they'll provide you with tools and fossil rich shale to find fossils you can keep. The staff are wonderfully sweet and helpful, and the fossils really are plentiful. We find a fish fossil and many plants and bugs! Very cool. Will repeat.

What a cool experience! This is a shale bed with many fossils embedded between the layers of shale. Many millions of years ago, volcanic ash trapped layers of living animals and plants. Fast forward to the present and you now have the opportunity to become an amateur paleontologist! We came with little kids but they still enjoyed it - the really young one was quite happy carting loads of sand and rocks around in the toy dump trucks. Our older one (younger than 6) wasn't quite dexterous enough to handle chipping away layers with a razor blade, but he was still quite happy to find good rocks and look for finds that were uncovered by a recent rain. We came on a cloudy day, so it wasn't too hot and we found a lot of neat stuff. You have to have patience... the fact that we found any fossils at all seems jaw-dropping to me, since fossils are such a rare thing to find typically. We left with fossils of several leaves and some reeds. This is mother nature we're talking about, not an pre-prepared easter egg hunt!