Fabulous Florida Fossil Shells
By Gary Schmelz
ISBN 9781634529808, published in 2015 by Dr. Gary Schmelz, Naples, Florida about 30.5 by 27.5 cm (about 10.75 by 12 inches) heavy paper stock covers, 56 pages illustrated with 46 full page colored photographic plates and 2 additional page sized plates showing fossil collecting and fossil collecting localities.
This beautiful book received its introduction at the COA Convention in Weston, Florida in July 2015. It is a book unlike any other that I know of on these shells and sales for the book at the Convention were brisk. It is not an identification guide although you can be sure that the specimens as identified by the author are fully correct. It contains photographs of only 111 species, Gastropods and Bivalves but what specimens they are. These are the very best of the best that the author has collected over the course of his 39 year studies of these shells. The shells have been beautifully and lovingly photographed and most often magnified to reveal them at their best. Although Florida has a very rich deposits of fossil shells very little attention is given to them. This book may change the way that we think about them and may make us realize that although these shells are long extinct they are in a way as beautiful and as interesting as the shells in our recent fauna. It also makes you pause a moment to think that huge numbers of these shells are commercially mined each and ground up for cement or other structural material. Also it is time to think that the shells that we see and collect now will one day be fossils too. Buy this book…I promise that you won’t regret it.
