Tools and directories

The check, before it goes in the jar or on a listing

Updated October 2026

On this page8

One: invertebrate, plant, or vertebrate?Two: what land did it come from?Three: can it be sold?Four: is the label true, and only as precise as you know?Five: does the specimen need dry air?Then mount it so it cannot move And keep the acquisition paper References

Five questions. Two of them decide whether the specimen can be sold at all.

One: invertebrate, plant, or vertebrate?

Casual collecting covers common invertebrate and plant paleontological resources. Five of the fifteen things in this group are vertebrates and it never covered them. A generic "fossil specimen" has to be resolved before anything else can be.

Two: what land did it come from?

Private, state, tribal, or federal, and if federal, which agency. PRPA is a federal land statute, and private land with the owner’s permission is a genuinely different and often entirely lawful answer.

Three: can it be sold?

Selling, purchasing or offering to do either is prohibited where the person knew or should have known the resource came from federal land. No provenance is not a defense. The pre-30-March-2009 exemption requires lawful possession before that date.

Four: is the label true, and only as precise as you know?

A false record, account, label or identification of a resource removed from federal land is a separate offense. Use compare, aff. or probable for a qualified identification, write "locality unknown" where that is the truth, and declare restoration.

Five: does the specimen need dry air?

Pyritized material, anything with a bloom or a sulfurous smell, and anything with soluble salts. If so, a sealed jar with a live desiccant in a cool stable place, inspected twice a year, with the desiccant replaced.

Then mount it so it cannot move

In inert padding or on a card, one specimen per jar, with the provenance card attached to the mount rather than loose. Abrasion is the one failure on these pages that is entirely within your control.

And keep the acquisition paper

Invoices, landowner permissions, correspondence, dates. Those are what turn a label into evidence, and they are what a museum or a serious buyer will ask for before anything else.

References

16 U.S.C. 470aaa, the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act definitions. Paragraph (1) defines casual collecting as a reasonable amount of common invertebrate and plant paleontological resources for non-commercial personal use by surface collection or non-powered hand tools with negligible disturbance; (2) defines Federal land; (4) defines paleontological resource and excludes archaeological resources and cultural items. law.cornell.edu

16 U.S.C. 470aaa-3, Collection of paleontological resources. A resource may not be collected from Federal land without a permit; casual collecting is allowed without one on Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation and Forest Service land; and a permitted collection remains the property of the United States, goes to an approved repository, and its locality data is not released without the Secretary’s written permission. law.cornell.edu

16 U.S.C. 470aaa-5, Prohibited acts; criminal penalties. Paragraph (a)(3) bars selling, purchasing or offering to, where the person knew or should have known the resource came from Federal land; (b) creates a false labeling offense; (c) sets penalties of up to 5 years, or 2 years where value and restoration cost do not exceed $500; (e) exempts resources in lawful possession before 30 March 2009. law.cornell.edu

16 U.S.C. 3372, the Lacey Act’s prohibited acts, which make it unlawful to import, export, transport, sell, receive, acquire or purchase fish, wildlife or plants taken, possessed, transported or sold in violation of any law, treaty or regulation of the United States, any Indian tribal law, or in interstate or foreign commerce any State or foreign law. law.cornell.edu

Written from federal statute, not from a prep lab. PRPA covers federal land; private land, state land and tribal land each answer to different rules, and foreign fossils bring export law with them. Nothing here is advice on a particular specimen, and the permit questions belong to the managing agency.