Florida Echinoids 2026

With a day off of work I decided to follow a lead I found on Eocene (38 million years old!) echinoids near Inglis, Florida. The site was in a heavily wooded area and the ground was still wet from a recent rain, a benefit to me as it had to potential to wash out previously unseen finds!

The main objective was to find a few different types of echinoids, a new type of collecting for me as I am mostly a vertebrate collector, and keep an eye out for any additional strange fossils in the formation.

A figure showing some of the possible examples that can be found at this site, though many of the echinoids are encrusted and need to be cleaned for proper identification

After the first few hours I had turned up nothing but fragments of P. floridanus and E. antillarium with complete finds eluding me most of the day. After a cut through the woods and brush I finally found my first one! I found a small stretch with multiple complete E. antillarium echinoids, much larger than I was expecting to see.

An example of a large probably E. antillarum in situ on the side of a hill, hard to spot amongst the brush and pine needles

The same in situ echinoid in hand, note the staining, and encrustation, a lot of work will be needed to clean these up.

The finds were patchy with no finds for a stretch and then multiple at once, at my last patch of the day there was one almost every few feet!

One of the nicer and least encrusted that I found at the last area of the day

The days haul, a mix of probable E. antillarium and Durhamella ocalana. In the fragments there are sections of P. floridanus but more research and cleaning will need to happen first

Some of the nicer ones in sunlight, I will update this thread with cleaned photos eventually but it was a successful day!