Owen Yonkin Fossil Collection

Ever since I can remember, I’ve always been intrigued by the various creatures which inhabited the earth in the distant past. As a toddler, I would read books over and over again, memorizing prehistoric animals like ammonites, mammoths, saber toothed cats, and trilobites. I spent the first 8 years of my life in an old brick house outside of the city of Saratoga Springs, NY, and as a little kid would frequently make trips to see the Upper Cambrian stromatolites at Lester Park. My first collecting “expeditions” were done on my grandparents’ land down in south-central New York. Whenever we visited, weather permitting, I would spend hours down at the creek searching through glacial erratics for brachiopods, bivalves, gastropods, and the occasional cephalopod.

Right before the COVID pandemic hit, I started to get more serious about collecting fossils. For the first few years, I was only getting out a few times a year, mostly to local-ish lower Devonian sites. In the summer of 2019, I collected the Hamilton Group of Central NY for the first time. I had only found pieces of trilobites up until that point, so finding my first complete Greenops was a real milestone for me, and really helped get the ball rolling. Once I got a car, I began to take weekend collecting trips, at first to Hamilton Group sites, but then branching out into the Ordovician and Silurian. Originally, I was primarily a surface collector, which works well at some localities, but learning how to move rock has definitely improved my ability to find rare bugs. Collecting really is about persistence in my mind, especially when you start targeting the rarer species. Sometimes every square foot of rock has a complete bug, but I’ve also had days where I’ll go 6 hours without a complete. If you’ve done your research and know there’s something worthwhile hiding in those layers, then it’s worth the hours of digging.

While I do think every fossil is significant in telling the story of earth’s past, trilobites have always been the primary focus of my collection. I can’t quite explain it, but there’s something about them that just jumped out at me when I first started collecting. Maybe it’s the seemingly endless number of trilobite species that one can acquire, or even the vast array of morphologies that these primitive arthropods possessed. Regardless of the reason, I’m hooked on bugs. As of June 2024, I have visited approximately 35 localities across New York State, and have devoted countless hours to the hobby!