Hobbies And Interests
Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fossils
The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Fossils features 474 full-color pictures of fossilized sponges, corals, trilobites, shells, teeth and bones. It also has 33 photographs of fossil bearing rocks, along with 15 maps of areas that have had large numbers of fossils and minerals found within them in the past. Ida Thompson, the author, gives an overview of the history of life on Earth and all the geological ages that have shaped the rocks, minerals and fossils we find around us today.
Peterson Field Guide to Rocks &Minerals
The Peterson Field Guide to Rocks &Minerals has had five editions, with the newest one including 385 color photographs of various rocks and minerals. Hundreds of minerals are also described detailing geography, physical properties, chemical composition and crystalline properties. Roger Tory Peterson, who started the Peterson Field Guides, was an American ornithologist, journalist and artist who sowed the seeds for the modern environmentalist movement, at least according to his biography distributed by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt on Amazon.com. This is an excellent guide to keep in a pack, while in the field, as it is more for the field and less for the reference library.
Mags Field Guide (blog)
The Mags Field Guide at magsfieldguide.blogspot.com is an online moderated forum on collecting, cleaning, storing and learning about fossils, rocks and minerals in general, but with a focus on the Eastern part of the United States. While it has only been around for a year with intermittent entries, the guide allows personal experience to become a part of the standard field guide, including entries about expeditions to find these fossils, rocks and minerals, as well as the actual descriptions and data associated with each specimen.