limestone. The builders had seen them before, looked almost like a root pattern in the limestone.

My dad has a limestone rock with all sorts of seashell fossils in it. It's pretty cool. They dug it up somehwhere years ago.

at my grandparents farm (Cow Creek and Plum Creek in Kansas) when the water level was low we could just turn over a decent sized stone and find fossils on the underneath side. Most farmers had a collection of fossils.

My great grandparent's farm had a limestone quarry. He paid it off in three years (1903) by selling/hauling limestone posts. See Land of The Post Rock:

http://www.bluestemstoneworks.com/History.htm

As you might imagine that farm was really amazing for fossil hunting.

if you click on Catalog of Historic Design and then Barns the first picture is of my great grandparent's barn. It was built by my great grandfather with stones quarried from a pit less than 200 yards away. I don't know when that picture was taken but the barn looks better now as they have cleaned off the added wooden structure and put on a new roof.

what a funny thing to be talking about on a Saturday morning...

... which is now more than 6000 feet above sea level.

here in Lincoln NE loaded with local fossilized sea creatures, from tiny creatures that you wouldn't look twice at on a beach today to 40-foot long plesiosaurs that will give you nightmares. As to how they're found, my favorite story is about not a sea creature but a wooly mammoth. A local farmer noticed his chickens scratching at a white spot in the yard -- which turned put to be the top of the skull of a wooly mammoth which in life was about 15(?) feet high at the shoulder. The entire skeleton was recovered, and it stands in the museum now.

mostly mosasaurs and plesiosaurs. A fossilized pregnant plesiosaur was recently discovered in Kansas.

Check out the Sternberg Museum (named after a famous family of fossil collectors) in Fort Hays -- home of the famous "fish within a fish" fossil.

Kansas also has fossil insects, and for some dryland critters, you can visit the Ashfall site, NE.

So I have never dug a well.

When I was a kid, we used to go hunting for shark teeth in South Dakota. My dad was a geologist, so he knew where to look. I/we found several rocks with shark teeth in them.

Presumably could do the same thing in Kansas.

We also found triolobites in shale in upstate New York. Once, an older cousin wanted to go fossil hunting with my dad. He was perhaps fifteen and I ten, but I tagged along like a little pest - and found the coolest fossil, which I call my New York rock. It is/was kinda shaped like New York and has a pair of seashells embedded in the rock. My cousin was kinda mad. I have to say "was" though because I do not know where my New York rock is any more. My dad may have used it in one of his rock fireplaces. Either in my childhood home, which is long sold, or in his retirement home - but I did not find it there.

Speak for yourself.

I have one of these on my desk--dug up from the yard.

In fact, find some bedrock and you can still find the sea shells in them (not just fossilized), trilobites and other annelids too.