Question: have you ever found a fossil only to figure out it was something else totally gross?

K. Lindsay Hunter answered on 12 May 2015:

My friends can tell you that I have a very bad habit of picking up roadkill and other dead things that I already KNOW to be totally gross. I used to have several barrels of bones in various states of decomp in my garage. Now, I have a lot of bones on all the shelves of my house!

Usually, when excavating for fossils or other bones, you just find things like plants or trash or even broken stalactites that kinda look like what you’re looking for, but really aren’t. That’s more disappointing than gross, though. Once, we even thought for a moment that a peanut we dropped was a tooth! Peanuts were banned after that. 🙂