Hey guys, trying to find a place to buy replica fossils for my son's birthday. I have been looking for awhile but I'm pretty much only finding places that sell museum quality replicas or real fossils and the prices are through the roof. The other sites I find are so poorly designed that it's impossible to navigate through them: example:

I'm looking for affordable fossil replicas of dinosaurs that my son would recognize. He's six so things like claws and teeth are what he can relate to. Getting something too small or obscure would be lost on him. I mean there has to be a place where you can get cool little dino things for a kid without paying out the ass or having them made of plastic.

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Give me a price range and I'll give you a site.

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mechaphil

Maybe get him a cheap one then take him hunting for real fossils. It's cheap and could also be called quality time. Might be hard to find dinosaurs, but you could probably find a fossilized prehistoric worm or something.

Most of them made a new board called the Drunkie. Badum tsh.


You could always get plaster and food coloring and go it yourself.

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Proud LGBTQQ Individual

This brings me back to my childhood, hunting for trilobite fossils at 18 Mile Creek with my dad.

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mechaphil

Yeah we're in Colorado so we're always out on the trails. We've been doing a lot of botany and bug searching for a couple years and now he's wanting a rock pick and dino gear. Phil I'm thinking under a hundred bucks. Looking (obviously) for more bang for the buck. Like teeth, claws, skulls, rock panels, etc. Something that his six year old brain could look at and know it's a dino instead of like a vertabrae or knuckle..lol.

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I haven't looked but I'd guarantee you Edmund Scientific has you covered

http://scientificsonline.com/

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Hold my beer and watch this...

ok, now I have looked and I was right

http://scientificsonline.com/search.asp ... il&ipp=ALL

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Hold my beer and watch this...

Cross has non-dino fossils covered, but here's a site with plenty of dinosaur fossil replicas for under $100:
http://www.prehistoricstore.com/dinosaurs/

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mechaphil

Shaweet. Trying to think like a boy...though i may get excited over some tiny little fossil that is millions of years old (well i mean a replica), Ash will probably wonder why I'm giving him a rock for his birthday...hahaha!

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Dude Phil, fucking A man. Nice job.

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Personal note: when my brother and I were kids, my dad had to go to some conference in San Diego for work. He decided to take a trip to the LaBrea Tar Pits before coming back and dipped his sabretooth tiger fang and velociraptor claw in the tar. He's got em on display in his house now.

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mechaphil

Honestly, go with a mix of both Cross' and my suggestions. Dinosaurs are all well and cool, but every kid knows what a dinosaur fossil looks like. On the contrary, few kids could tell you what an ammonite or trilobite looks like.

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mechaphil

Yeah for sure. I'm kinda browsing through both. He's a young rock hound so I'm thinking a pick, a dino one and either an ammonite or trilobite..or even like a fern leaf or fish

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I think an ammonite is cooler than a trilobite, and usually a bigger fossil, too.

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mechaphil

Personal note: The La Brea tar pits are one of the more depressing historic / museum sites in the US.

It's basically a 2 acre plot in the middle of a city surrounded by tall buildings. Litter blows in from the streets and gets stuck in the tar.
(they do have a neat museum there though)

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Hold my beer and watch this...

I'm thinking that I'm going to buy myself a birthday gift too from that site. My b-day is two days after his...lol.

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That is depressing

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mechaphil

His birthday looks like this: Lunch, Denver Natural History Museum (military gets free tickets nice), movie, ice cream then camping out in the yard with a fire.

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Well all those animals picked a popular place to die...the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax in LA.
Prime real estate.

Although it is right next to the museum of modern art and the Peterson automotive museum, so a day can be spent in that area.

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Hold my beer and watch this...