Personnel of the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History can help identify fossils legally purchased and/or collected from State land in Florida.

To aid our identifications, please tell us where the specimen was found, to the best of your knowledge. Our comparative collection mostly contains fossils from Florida and the Caribbean. We recommend you look elsewhere for help with fossil identifications from outside of these regions.

A special note about “dinosaur eggs” from Florida. These are concretions and are not fossils! There are no naturally occurring fossils of dinosaurs in the state. The nearest dinosaur fossils have been found in central western Georgia and central Alabama.

For Identification, please email images of specimens to vertpaleo@floridamuseum.ufl.edu:

• Email attachments in JPEG format, or post them on your own website and email the address (URL) of the site.
• Please include a ruler or some other indication of scale in the image. Take pictures of more than one side of the specimen.

We are happy to provide this resource to the public. For large collections (more than 10 specimens), we ask that you make a voluntary contribution, to offset the time involved, to the VP Research Fund in the UF Foundation. It supports research and fieldwork to collect fossils throughout Florida.