i’m not a fan of the system’s built-in obscure functionality. in this case, i think it would be better to mark a fossil observation completely private. alternatively, the observer could manually set the location at, say, 10km away in a random direction, and set positional accuracy at, say, 15km. if the photo has GPS coordinates attached to it, he’d have to manually strip those out before uploading to make sure the photo metadata doesn’t reveal the true location. it’s a little more cumbersome this way but better than using the system’s built-in obscure functionality i think.
welcome to the iNaturalist community @mark-sundown!
also… if while making the fossil observation you’re making other observations that will not be private or obscured in some way, then i would also upload those separately at a different time and use a totally different observation date for the fossil observation. (you’ll also have to manually change the photo metadata in that case to also obscure the time.)