About
About Fossil Wharf
Fossil Wharf is a set of free tools for anyone who picks up a fossil on a beach and wonders what it is, how old it is and how big the animal was: families, beachcombers, amateur collectors and students.
How it works
Every calculator runs in your browser. Nothing you type, measure or tick is sent to us or anyone else, and the tools keep working offline once a page has loaded.
Where the numbers come from
Each page names its sources beside the results: peer-reviewed papers for shark sizes and the dates of events, the International Commission on Stratigraphy's chart for the time scale, the IAEA's nuclear data for half-lives, museums and geological surveys for fossil ages and animal sizes, and the official codes, laws and land managers for collecting rules. Where we could not find a good source, we left the item out rather than guess.
What it is not
Shark lengths, ages and sizes are estimates with real uncertainties, and the collecting rules are general information, not legal advice. Rules change and local rules or landowners come first, so check before you go. For a find that looks important, ask a museum.
Fossil Wharf uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies or cross-site tracking and never receives what you type into the tools. See the privacy page.