MGS members are avid collectors of fossils and minerals. Part of the fun of collecting is displaying the specimens that have been newly added to your collection. The Gallery pages offer MGS members an opportunity to share pictures of those new additions or any fine specimens in their collections. We have also included many pictures of club activities in the gallery.

To submit pictures for the gallery pages, please email them to the Please include a brief description of what is shown in the picture and where, when, and how you found it.

On Sunday, May 22nd, the MGS held its first in-person meeting since the end of 2019. This joint meeting with the American Fossil Federation was held at the outdoor picnic pavilion of the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory located outside of Laurel, MD. Plenty of specimens were on display. This was a great opportunity to catch up, see some wonderful specimens, and add to collections. Photos below were taken by MGS junior member David.

Jim Stedman prepared this montage of some of the minerals donated to the MGS in 2022.

Jim Stedman prepared this montage of some mollusks from the St. Marys Formation.

Dr. Victor Perez, assistant curator of paleontology at the Calvert Marine Museum, spoke at the May meeting about the evolution, ecology, and body size of Megalodon. He made a strong case that the Great White is not the evolutionary descendant of Megalodon. The screen shot below shows some of the salient differences between teeth from these two types of shark.

Dr. Perez discussed methods of estimating Megalodon body size. He reviewed the commonly used (but erroneous) rule of thumb based on the maximum size of its teeth, as well as the more rigorous methodology that initially replaced it. He concluded by delineating a new methodology he derived based on "summed crown width." The image below shows a screen-capture from his talk which summarizes the three main points he made.

The slides Dr. Perez used during his talk can be accessed in a PDF file here. His scientific paper on the topic can be accessed in full here.

Tom and Joy Piscitelli were able to safely visit North Myrtle Beach, SC, this spring and Tom found many, many fossil (and recent) treasures in the sand. The beach sand is brought in from different places and, so, the fossils can be of a variety of ages, from relatively recent to as far back as the Cretaceous or earlier. (The Dentalium shells shown here are recent and not fossils.) As you can see from the images below, the finds range from teeth to shells.

Dave Andersen sent in this picture of an impressive Cylindracanthus fossil specimen which is from a Maryland site and Eocene in age. The taxonomic history of this genus is quite complicated, perhaps raising more questions than it answers.

At the March, 2021, meeting, MGS vice president Eric Seifter spoke about the methdology for estimating the age of mammoth teeth. The talk was based on his article which appeared in the March issue of the MGS newsletter (available on the Selected Past Issues page).

The MGS held its November 15, 2020, meeting on Zoom. Here are a couple of images from that meeting. For the mineral of the meeting, Bob Farrar discussed cordierite.



Eric Seifter showed a piece of petrified "peanut" wood from the Cretaceous found in Australia. (This kind of wood exhibits bore holes created by wood-eating clams. Those holes, prior to fossilization, became filled with the shells of radiolarians.)

On May 17th, members of the MGS and the American Fossil Federation were treated to a virtual tour of MGS VP Eric Seifter's new fossil museum. This tour took place about two years after a devastating fire consumed his house and damaged many of his fossils. The breadth and depth of the specimens on display are staggering. Among the riches are mammoth tusks and teeth; dinosaur teeth, eggs, footprints, and coprolites; fossils from early plants; ancient whale skulls, vertebrae, and teeth; and seemingly innumerable Ecphora shells. This barely scratches the surface. A few screenshots from the tour appear below.

During the November meeting, Junior Member Trevor enthusiastically described his experiences at a paleontology summer camp held at Stratford Hall (VA). He also displayed the various fossil treasures he found during his week at camp.











































Here is so-called "peanut wood," a piece of Cretaceous Araucaria with borings made by the Teredo bivalve. This specimen is from Western Australia.



Eric is seen below holding up a piece of a Triassic conifer found in the Chinle Formation, Arizona.



Here is a slab of fossil fern, Psaronius cottae, from the Permian. It was found in the petrified forest of Chemnitz, Saxony, Germany.