Bram explores the Foram world                      Frondicularia sp., Foraminifera Dentalina sp., Foraminifera Nummulites sp., Foraminifera                          

    
Bram collecting sediments with foraminifera near Antwerp harbor

Sediments dragged from the Scheldt River near Antwerp harbor are of mixed Cenozoic Age.
    
Collecting fossils

I'm Bram, I live in The Netherlands, I'm 17 years old and I'm going to study biology next year. I have been interested in nature (any nature: animals, plants, terrestrial, marine, big, small, but also evolution, ecosystems, etc.) as long as I can remember. About 9 years ago I started to focus more and more on fossils, I started to collect them, and now I'm addicted to fossil collecting! I collect all fossils, from all animal and plant groups from any era. However, I do particularly like echinoid fossils (also recent echinoids) and mammal remains from the last Ice Age.

As I said, I collect fossils from all ages, so that includes the Paleogene and Neogene. In the region around the city of Antwerp, Belgium, sediments from these times are at the surface. Most of them are sadly not in-situ anymore, they were sucked up from the bottom of the Scheldt river and deposited at a different location by huge ships to create new space for the ever-growing harbor.

Basically every visit I make to this site, I take a couple of buckets of randomly collected sand with me. I sieve that sand in water with a little bit less than 1 millimeter mesh. When it's dry, I search it through by spreading a little bit of the material on a soup plate. Most of the fossils I pick out of this material are bivalves or fish remains (like shark- and fishteeth, and otoliths), but occasionally there's a foram in there too. I've also sieved material with about 0.25 millimeter mesh, but I still have to search that through under the microscope.     
View into the bucket after sieving

    

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