Selling material collected on public land
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The question that turns a legal hobby into an illegal business without anybody noticing the moment it happened.
The line collectors miss
The BLM personal-use allowance is for noncommercial collection. That word is the whole of this page.
Collecting 25 pounds in a day for your own collection is permitted. Selling that material is not covered by the same allowance, and doing so requires a permit or a mining claim.
The trap is sequence. Somebody collects legally for years, starts selling duplicates, and has now put the earlier collecting into a different category. Nothing about the collecting changed; the purpose did.
What BLM actually allows
Reasonable amounts of rocks, mineral specimens and semiprecious gemstones for noncommercial purposes: 25 pounds per day plus one piece, not more than 250 pounds a year.
Not on developed recreation sites, not where there is an active claim or other authorized mineral use, and not where the mineral estate is privately owned.
Above that, or for commercial purposes, a permit. And selling requires a permit or a claim.
Other agencies differ. National Park Service land prohibits removal entirely under 36 CFR 2.1, so nothing collected there is salable under any circumstances.
Fossils are separate
The Paleontological Resources Preservation Act governs fossils on federal land. Vertebrate fossils remain federal property and require a permit to collect; they are never yours to sell.
Common invertebrate and plant fossils may be collected in reasonable amounts for personal, noncommercial use, which is the same structure as minerals and the same commercial line.
Selling a vertebrate fossil collected from federal land is a serious matter, and "I did not know" is not a position anybody wants to be in.
Getting it right
Know the source of every specimen you sell. That is a catalog field, not a memory.
For material you intend to sell: collect it from private land with the owner's permission covering resale, from a fee-dig site, from a claim you hold, under a permit, or buy it from somebody who did.
Ask the managing office when in doubt. The question is routine and they answer it.
And keep the documentation. The record of where a specimen legitimately came from is the same record that makes it worth more.