>While looking carefully in the pebble/shell/vegetation rubble, often at the high tide line, I have occasionally come across exquisite fossils. Most have been crinoids and coral. My two prize finds are brachiopods. These specimens are rock-hard, nothing like the chalky specimens from the Calvert Cliffs area in Maryland. Shireen Gonzaga's fossils sound Paleozoic, but Delaware has no Paleozoic rocks at the surface. I suspect that you have been collecting fossils from the "Riprap Formation"--a joke name for Paleozoic limestone that is quarried in blocks and laid down to protect riverbanks and beaches from erosion. This is called "riprap" and it often does yield some very nice things. The problem is to identify where the riprap was originally quarried, which is a question that only people on the spot can answer. Rock being heavy and expensive to transport, it usually isn't far.* The folks at the Delaware Geological Survey might be able to answer this, but then again they might not. Well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Their address is: Delaware Geological Survey, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716-7501; telephone (302) 831-2833. Andrew K. Rindsberg Geological Survey of Alabama *An interesting exception to this general rule is the rock used as ship ballast up to fairly recent times. Ships are designed to handle best while filled with cargo. If no cargo were available, rocks were often used; now water is the usual ballast. Over the decades, enough discarded ballast accumulated in some harbors to extend the shoreline, as in Mobile, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida. Ballast rocks from England are not at all uncommon there. Incidentally, the use of water as ballast has had disastrous consequences for estuaries all over the world. When a ship dumps rocks, nothing much happens. But water, which can contain all sorts of living creatures, is quite another matter. Chiefly as a result of unintended introductions, San Francisco Bay, California, has practically no native ecology left. The Black Sea's fisheries have been depleted by the introduction of a common Atlantic comb jelly (ctenophore, genus Mnemiopsis) that eats fish larvae. Eastern North America's waterways are currently being devastated by the introduction of the zebra mussel, which is native to the Black Sea and arrived in ballast water. And so on. 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