Locality · City park: free collecting

Mineral Wells Fossil Park

Palo Pinto, Texas, United States

Mineral Wells Fossil Park is a former city landfill borrow pit turned free public collecting site where the Pennsylvanian Mineral Wells Formation weathers out crinoid stems and calices, brachiopods, bryozoans, Petalodus shark teeth and the occasional trilobite. It is one of the few sites in the country that explicitly invites collecting and lets you keep everything. Fossils lie loose on the surface after rain.

Country	United States
State / province	Texas
County	Palo Pinto
Land manager / status	City of Mineral Wells
Access	Free, open daily; hand tools only
What is found	Pennsylvanian crinoids, brachiopods, bryozoans, Petalodus shark teeth, trilobite fragments
Coordinates (public site)	32.83, -98.15

Rules

The park is open to the public for free hand collecting and everything found may be kept; no power tools, no digging deeper than the weathered surface, and the park asks that unusual finds be shown to staff.

Source: https://www.mineralwellstx.gov/ (checked 2026-09-16).

Collecting rules

Elsewhere

Collecting rules (official page)

Cite this article

Stratum Strata. "Mineral Wells Fossil Park" (Locality). Stratum Strata pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-21. https://stratum.black/strata/localities/mineral-wells-fossil-park. Accessed 2026-09-21.

BibTeX · CSL-JSON

@misc{stratum-mineral-wells-fossil-park,
  title        = {Mineral Wells Fossil Park},
  author       = {{Stratum Strata}},
  howpublished = {\url{https://stratum.black/strata/localities/mineral-wells-fossil-park}},
  year         = {2026},
  note         = {Locality article, Stratum Strata pack 2026.09, as of 2026-09-21; sources: stratum, commons. Accessed 2026-09-21.}
}

Citations carry the pack version and the article's as-of date so they resolve to the same text later. The facts themselves belong to the sources listed below; cite those for the science.