Derek Voss

Derek's interest in fossils started the ordinary way — a childhood rock and shell collection that never really stopped growing. What changed his approach to it as an adult was a trip to a BLM fossil locality in the Rockies, where he picked up a small dense fragment that looked, to him, like an unusually shaped piece of petrified wood. Another collector at the site glanced at it and told him it was more likely bone. Derek put it down, but the moment stuck with him: he had been about to walk off federal land with something the Paleontological Resources Preservation Act specifically prohibits collecting, and he wouldn't have known it.

That sent him into the actual statute rather than secondhand advice. PRPA (16 U.S.C. §§ 470aaa et seq., enacted 2009) splits federal fossil law into two tiers: common invertebrate and plant fossils are collectable on BLM and national forest land under a personal-use allowance, while any vertebrate material — bone, teeth, tracks, regardless of size or completeness — requires a research permit and cannot be legally collected casually anywhere on federal land. The distinction sounds simple in writing and is genuinely difficult to apply standing in front of an actual fragment.

Derek now researches specific fossil-hunting locations with that two-tier system as the starting point: what tier of material is documented at the site, which agency manages the land, and what that agency's own guidance says about reporting significant or ambiguous finds. He treats "leave it and report it" as the correct default whenever a find's tier isn't obvious, and builds that judgment into every location guide rather than only listing what's technically allowed.

His research draws directly from agency fossil-collecting policy pages, the PRPA text itself, and site-specific land-use guidance — not forum consensus about what a particular formation "usually" produces.