Washington

The Stonerose Interpretive Center in Republic runs the best-known Eocene plant and insect site in the state on city land: visitors buy a day permit, collect with hand tools in the shale, may keep up to three fossils per person per day, and must show finds to staff, who retain scientifically important pieces. It is a personal-collection site by rule.

Washington State Parks prohibit removing natural resources (WAC 352-32). DNR-managed state trust lands allow recreational rockhounding of small amounts of rocks and minerals in some areas but treat fossils as a resource requiring authorisation; the Department of Natural Resources' recreation rules are the reference, and the practical position is that fossil collecting on DNR land needs a written OK. Verify locally: DNR's current recreational collecting guidance.

Federal land — the Olympic and Cascade national forests, BLM parcels in the east — follows the casual-collecting rule for common invertebrates and plants and petrified wood; Ginkgo Petrified Forest is a state park (closed); Mount Rainier, Olympic and North Cascades are national parks (closed). Concretions and shells on the Olympic Peninsula and Puget Sound beaches sit on a patchwork of tribal, state and private tidelands, and tribal beaches are closed.

Washington's ivory law (RCW 77.15.135, from Initiative 1401) prohibits sale of parts of elephant, rhinoceros, lion, tiger, leopard, cheetah, pangolin, marine turtle, shark and ray, with antique exceptions; mammoth is not in the list, but confirm before selling tusk into the state.