Florissant Lake Beds, Teller County, CO
Fossil
 Oligocene

Ted Thatcher, an entomologist at Colorado State University, was kind enough to take a pimply high school student with his graduate students on trips to Florissant during the 1950s. These are the specimens I collected then and several return trips as an adult.

There are macro and micro views and most have two sides when the matrix broke across the fossil. The current thinking is that the lake beds are late Eocene to Oligocene.

Beetles (Coleoptera)

Beetle #1
Weevil #1
Weevil #2
Side 1 of Weevil #3
Side 2 of Weevil #3

Left side of Beetle l#1
Right side of Weevil #1
Right side of Weevil #2
Side 1 of Weevil #4
Side 2 of Weevil #4

Diptera

Leaf Hopper

Spider

Snail

Tsetse Fly
Leaf Hopper
Spider
Vitrea fagelis

Right side of Tsetse Fly
Right side of leaf hopper
Left side of spider
Left side of snail

Leaves

Populus sp., i.e., poplar leaf
Salix sp., i.e., a willow leaf
Alder leaf
Lomatia lineata
Fagopsis longifolia, a beech leaf

Flower with midge

Grass seed

Grass leaf

The smudge to the righr or left of the flower stem is a tiny insect (It is three millimeters long.)
Side 1 of tiny insect by the flower stem
Side 2 of tiny insect by the flower stem

Right side of grass seed
The tip of a grass leaf

Elm Seed

Fish #1

Fish #2

Cross section of Florissant strata

Cedrelospermum lineatum seed(a type of elm)
Left side of elm seed
A small fish collected in the 1950s
A large fish collected in the 2010s
In the lower half, the front fin can be seen below ribs and a cheeck bone on the far right.
This shows the layers of the Florissant Lake deposits—alternate layers of volcanic ash, diatoms, and clay.