Fossils in rocks

[karen33317]

The curator commenting on prehistoric creatures, made me think.
Is a picture of a fossil rock or a prehistoric shark tooth considered acceptable things to post? For example, I have some coral rock that you can see seashells embedded in. I also have a rock, with what looks like a fern or something and I have what I would presume is a prehistoric shark tooth.

[bouteloua]

Definitely fine to post, but it would be marked as casual grade.

@bouteloua

From staff in one of several previous similar conversations (bolding mine):

As cool as archaeological and geological finds are, iNaturalist’s focus is on users sharing their observations of recent, wild organisms and it’s not really the place for uploading observations of other things. To make it an ever expanding platform for archaeological finds, artifacts, geology, etc., would blur the focus of the site and make it significantly more difficult to run. A few fossil uploads here and there (properly marked as not recent evidence) are fine , but it would be better to find or create other platforms specific to those types of finds (eg rockd.org rather than shoehorn them onto iNaturalist. iNaturalist code is open source so it could be theoretically adapted to create such platforms.

From the Data Quality Assessment description:

[kiwifergus]

I think of it as “off-label” use of iNat… not to be encouraged, definitely not supported (you won’t get feature requests approved to help your objective), and you definitely shouldn’t be doing so on a large scale or for significant projects. But hey, it happens!

[bobby23]

Not gonna lie, in my early days on iNaturalist I uploaded the occasional fossil to test the “scope” of iNaturalist’s taxonomy (like this one I made of Spinosaurus teeth), but it’s definitely within the minority of my observations and I would not feel comfortable doing this anymore than I have. Long extinct taxa like dinosaurs and mammoths are a burden on taxon curators.