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Join Adam Barralet, Kyle Perez , Ashley Leavy and Nicholas Pearson in Episode #29 of the Crystal Confab Podcast as they do a deep dive into Ammonite & Fossils meaning, including:

• Kitchen witchery & Fossils
• Opal and Fossils combining to make Ammolite
• Horns of Ammon, Avalon connection and Ammonite

Tune in now for a deeper look at Ammonite & Fossils meaning!

Podcast Episode Transcript:

Crystal Confab Podcast Introduction: Are you just starting with crystals? Or maybe you have a whole collection but aren’t sure how to use them? Join four crystal nerds, healers, workers, and lovers for a casual chat about all things crystals.

Adam Barralet: Hello, and welcome to this week’s episode of crystal confab. Each week, we like to talk about things that are buried in the ground and have been waiting for a long, long time for us to discover them. But today, we’re doing something a little bit different because we won’t be talking about a crystal. We’re gonna be exploring the world of fossils and things like amylenite and ammolite. So I’m gonna be honest with you.

Fossils don’t really thrill me. So I’ve set a challenge to the other three to see if they can win me over by the end of the episode. So to dive in and explore these, welcome, Kyle, Nicholas, and Ashley. Kyle, I know you like the ammolites and ammonites. Talk us a little bit through them.

Kyle Perez: Well, for me, I am kind of like you in the way that I’m not a huge fossil person, but I know other people around the confab are much much bigger. I will start with fossil light, ammolite. But what I wanna talk about first is what I’ve seen as an explosion of interest in fossils recently. I don’t know if the rest of you have seen this as well, but last year at the gem show that I worked at, people gave no crap about the crystals. I had to learn on the fly about the fossils that we had because that’s where a huge amount of interest was.

Our ammolite shells, our ammonites, the megalodon teeth, like amber, green ambers, all of these sorts of things were, like, really exciting. Have you seen that sort of thing, or is it maybe just a niche thing that’s happening here?

Nicholas Pearson: Yeah. I’m pretty much seeing it industry wide, but I would love to say that it’s probably people like Ashley and me who might be bringing some more crystal folks to the dark side. I haven’t been to any, like, really big trade shows in a hot minute, but I know Ashley frequents them. So she might have some more insight there too.

Ashley Leavy: Yeah. I think if I really reflect on it, the fossil boots might have been a little bit busier than they normally are. Usually, I’m one of, like, two or three people shopping at those booths for the store. So maybe that is the case. I haven’t noticed it yet trending amongst the crystally people, the healy feelies, like all of us.

I feel like I’m always being like the fossil evangelist out there, trying to get people to appreciate them a little bit. I know Nicholas is the same. We actually did an amazing event last year hosted by Anwen Avalon who did, like, a fossil symposium, and it was Anwen, Nicholas, myself, Brett Holyhead, and Moss Matthew. And it was just, like, five days of fossils, and it was super fun. But that is very much not the norm.

I think it takes a little, a little bit of special interest to get people going.

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Kyle: I love that. I think it’s really interesting to see these trends that we see in the industry. Now we digress. I’m going to talk about amylites. Now amylites are the very niche ammonites that have a really beautiful opalized shell that you find in the Upper Western Territories of Canada, I believe, is where you’re finding it.

And it’s the, sorry. I can never remember exactly where it is but I know it’s on the West Coast Canada, Alaska like that bridge between the two and that you’re kind of only finding them there. And what’s amazing about them is they take these shelves, these ammonites that we all know and love that we’ve seen all over the place and they become opalized and really saturated in color and I’m just gonna be a little bit annoying and pop my light on and hopefully you’ll be able to see it in full quality. We love it when we do this live because we’re not as prepared as we want to be. There we go you can sort of see it’s opalized that this one has a really beautiful color.

What I love about it is, for me, it’s about illumination. The spiral path that the ammonites show us for me is really omnipresent. It’s like we’re on this spiral. When you work with them, you’re going inwards, you’re going outwards. Energy is coming and going in this beautiful flow.

And analytes have shown me the spiral path can be beautiful. We can illuminate and expand. We can draw in magic when we work with it in the right way as opposed to feeling like I’m going round and round in circles and I can’t get off the loop. Right? That’s the dichotomy of the spiral path.

When we think about going round and round in circles we can’t get out of it. We can’t break the cycle. That’s really really frustrating. But when you look at ammonites, they radiate. Right?

And as they go outwards, they expand. So as we go out and grow and go forward and do more and break through these cycles they get easier. We get further perspective from them. We’re able to shift what we’re seeing and shift what we’re doing with our life. We’re feeling more capable.

We’re seeing more options. We’re seeing a bigger spectrum of color being illuminated in front of us. That’s the lesson for me that amylite has really shown me. It’s been like yes it does go around. Yes you will find these lessons come around again.

Yes you will hit a point where you’re seeing it again but that’s what we do. Right? The earth goes around and around in cycles and it’s going around the sun. And the sun is going around the center of our galaxy, and the galaxy is spinning and expanding, and everything is spinning and expanding in this universe. And that’s a big thought process to think about when we’re thinking about fossils.

But if we can bring it back down to us, the journey is always expanding and growing. And, yes, we will hit points where we’ve come around and I thought I dealt with that problem, but maybe you need to just grow from it again. Maybe we need to continue to experience these things because otherwise history repeats itself. Right? When we get too far away from the problem and we’ve healed it all of a sudden and it hasn’t been around, it comes back around again because we’ve stopped talking about it.

We’ve stopped thinking about it. It hasn’t been a problem anymore. All of a sudden, a couple of generations down the line, you see the same thing happening. And we’re all seeing it happening, right, on the planet. It’s really important that we’re like, okay.

Yes. It’s a cycle. How can we expand? How can we grow? Right?

We’re in a different place and time than we were when we were going through similar things. How can I use a shift in perspective that is more illuminated? And this is where Amalites have really come into their own for me because they show that full spectrum. All opals reveal a full spectrum of possibility, a full spectrum of what you can do, what you can dive into, what you can actually achieve, and it really lifts instead of the spiral going down and the spiral going inwards and the spiral coming to that point of my cart and closing us off. I like to work with it in that way. If I’m drawing it in, I’m drawing it into me because I’m trying to create something.

I’m trying to bring energy in. I’m not using the spiral to go down. Does that make sense? Like, it’s that kind of spiral thing. So when you work with your beautiful ammonites, it doesn’t have to be opalized, but you do find ones like this that have a little bit of that opally sheen.

There are other ones that are like light that really sort of gray light opally. Really beautiful. You can see them. They’re so affordable. They’re everywhere.

Start with one of those because the Ammolite from Canada is a bit harder to get and a little bit more expensive.

Ashley: I have a question for you, Kyle. A lot of times when people are considering the ways in which they work with their stones, they’re looking at color as part of that. And when we have these, like, completely beautiful rainbow filled amylites, do you notice any difference? Because it’s rare to find a piece that has, like, all the colors of the rainbow. They kind of tend to be, like, a little warmer colors or, like, red, orange, gold or a little cooler colors, kinda blue, green, violet.

Do you notice any difference between the two? Do you have any, like, anything to share with folks who might be wondering about, like, the color part of that and how that fits in?

Kyle: Absolutely. So I actually have another piece that’s really purple. I don’t know if you can see that on camera. It’s got a really indigo purple tone to it, and I find that it’s the most gentle. It’s the least kind of active of the ones that I have.

The ones that are yellowy orange definitely have a more active energy, definitely have more not pushy, but, like, be bubblier, if that makes sense. Whereas this one, I think, is much more subtle. So if you can find ones in the blue purple spectrum, it will give you, I think, less of a shove and more of a gentle push into that expanse whereas the brighter colors I think are like let’s go, let’s do, let’s jump feet first. It’s that kind of enthusiastic energy that I think it brings which I really love. And so this is why I really love their groundedness.

They have a settling nature that supports us. They have been through the ringer. They lived in the ocean. They’ve been fossilized. They’ve been unearthed.

They’re here again. Like, we can go through some processes and we can still be beautiful. We can still be appreciated and we can still grow and expand and find a way forward. Like, when you don’t know where you’re going, I just think reach for an ammonite. Reach for an ammonite.

You might be surprised at how illuminating the way can be for you.

Adam: I love that. That’s really yeah. Okay. We’re maybe starting to sign some uses for these, which is really interesting. But I wanna see what Nicholas has to say because, Nicholas, I know you love them.

You and Ashley are often talking about ammonites and everlites. First of all, can you differentiate between the two? There’s ammonite and ammolite. Is the light the one that sparkles, the opalized one?

Nicholas: So, ammolite is a trade name given only to the ammonites that are found in the uppermost region of the Rocky Mountains here in North America. Nearly all of the, we’ll say, mining of any, like, economical value on them is done in Canada. Although I have heard of similarly iridescent deposits coming from elsewhere in the Rockies, the iridescence on them comes from tiny platelets of aragonite. And there are other ammonites worldwide that it’s believed that when they form in softer substrates, such as soft sedimentary rocks, that are carbonate rich. It can undergo a similar kind of aragonatization instead of a calcitization or pyrotization or a silicification that we see in other forms of them that are out there.

And so they can retain iridescence. But it seems like that Canadian material is by far the most, we’ll say, resplendent of any of them that I’ve seen. And when you do get to go to Tucson and go to the really high end mineral galleries, and they have ones that are, like, huge and intact. It’s really hard to love any other one after you’ve seen one that’s, you know, $200,000. So I don’t own any amylites despite how much I love them in theory.

My taste has been spoiled. So I have a lot of the more humble ammonites, and, you know, some of them range from little teeny guys like this one here from Somerset. This one formed in a kind of chalky substrate, so it’s mostly carbonate minerals in there. I’ve got one that would have formed more of like Elias, and this one has a little snake’s head carved into it. More on that in a moment.

And I see Ashley has her twin there. And, of course, because I got challenged as the the size queen last week. I have my big ammonite, which normally sits on my altar. I wanted to make sure that I was in the contender for largest rock this week. I adore these stones.

So the name ammonite comes to us from, an old expression that refers to a kind of composite deity. So the original Greek would have sounded something along the lines of or or amonas cornua, which meant the horns of the god Ammon, a m m o n, which is the sort of Greekified version of Amun, a m u n, in ancient Egypt. And we’re gonna, like, get back to that point in a moment, but, essentially, they resemble the coiling horns of rams and goats. And so I’m wearing my goat head right here to be on brand for the week, as our token Capricorn in the group. These are rocks that have a truly ancient history with human beings.

The archaeological record suggests that for at least twenty thousand years, hominids have intentionally gone out of their way to collect these stones, probably because they were unusual shapes and could be found in nature and that sparked who knows what kind of ancient practices. We have a few things that we can conjecture from what we found. We know that they were used ornamentally. They were sometimes pierced to be worn or carried as amulets or attached to tools. We have some that were buried with the dead.

They were also frequently used as votive offerings either to the deceased or to spirits. A really famous instance of the use of this stone as a votive offering is on top of Glastonbury tour. In the nineteen sixties, there was, a scholar by the name of Philip Rotz who was digging up lots of Glastonbury, and he was able to do a partial dig on top of the tour and found a collection of more than 400 of these ammonite fossils that were intentionally placed there. Many strata beneath the current stone tower that stands, the remains of Saint Michael’s that’s on top of the tour. And we are not entirely sure, but this is probably, like, pre Romano, Celtic era, so before the Roman occupation, and maybe the result of a kind of very ancient pagan worship site that was there.

These could have been offerings to a particular god, which we’re gonna speculate about in a moment, or maybe to the gods in general. But the inherent otherness of this stone is what makes them so special. And one day, we’ll do a deep dive into the otherness of fossils as a whole. But when we find them in these kind of traditional settings, whether it’s very far back into the stone age or, you know, into the medieval period, they are just incredible. They’ve been intentionally chosen as building materials, fossiliferous limestones adorned with these spiraling forms, these whorls.

We see them dug out of cliff faces and used by ancient and medieval peoples alike, oftentimes associated with healing, protection, connection to the landscape, to the deceased, and to the dreams. Pliny the Elder can consider them to be wonderful stones for prophetic dreaming. But the most obvious appearance is that the most obvious thing they resemble is a serpent, or a dragon in some instances, which has won them lots of names, serpent stone, or dragon stone in German, snake stone, and so many others. There are a lot of fun myths about their formation often attributed to figures like Saint Hilda, Saint Kiena, Saint Cuthbert, and a few others. But we see that there is this kind of connection between, say, divine intervention in the formation of these stones long before we understood what fossilization was as a process.

There were a lot of these really poetic descriptions of how these unusual rocks came to be. Because they were considered similar to serpents, we see them connected to things like protection from poison, whether those were venomous creatures and the things that, you know, slink by on the ground or buzz by us and can sting us, but also spiritual poisons, protecting us from ill thoughts and harmful magic and, you know, bad spirits and things depending on where you are in the world. As horn-like formations, though, if we consider that they resemble those kinds of spiral horns, they are there for a few other purposes. So Plato records that the Ammonos Kanuwa, is the most prized stone in Ethiopia that resembles a ram’s horn, that it brings prophetic dreams. And he’s attributing this to Ethiopia, but he’s probably off by a little bit in his geography because Ammon is an Egyptian deity.

And he was at one point the chief god in Egypt’s empire, because different ages prioritize different deities depending on allegiances to different temples, not unlike we see elsewhere in the world. And when we get that kind of Hellenic period, the deity Zeus or Jupiter or Jove or Yove is synchronized with them. So we get this kind of, dual deity, Jupiter Amon or Yove Amon, who is otherwise presented like Zeus or Jupiter would be, but has adopted the horns. And rather than using the kind of long twisted horns we see in the Egyptian representations, they are coiled ram’s horns close to the head. Alexander the Great was even depicted with these selfsame horns that resemble an Ammonite because he wanted to kind of, up his street cred by resembling the very gods that he was drawing power and strength from.

Elsewhere in the world, though, we’ve got the same connection to horns. In China, they were known as, which means horn stone, among the Blackfoot Confederacy here in the so called new world, so called America. We have them called, which means buffalo stones because the individual compartments that break out resemble sleeping buffalo or sleeping bison who are horned creatures. And then, of course, we get that connection to Glastonbury Tor. There’s a really lovely chap by the name of, Aaron Aaron Leech, who has written a handful of books on Glastonbury and Avalon, all these mythos, and he has one speculative book that looks at all the evidence we’ve got that suggests what the kind of pre Christian rites of worship might have been.

And in the Roman period, if we look at what little evidence we’ve got plus those really ancient, offerings of the, Ammonites buried there, he suggested it might be possible that a horned figure like Jupiter Amun was syncretized with a native deity who might also have been horned or more likely antlered in that part of the world. And so this could have been originally associated with gods like, you know, Pan, Carnunos, and taken to other parts of the world to associate with Dionysus and the like. And there’s a really interesting astronomical phenomenon that kind of underscores this, and that is a special alignment that takes place on Glastonbury tour when the sun enters the sign of Capricorn, the goat with its horns. And all of this might have come together to suggest that the magic of Ammonite is deeply steeped in the magic of the land. These deities that we see, particularly they’re sometimes depicted as antler god Gwynapneath, who is said to dwell in a crystal castle inside the heart of Glastonbury Tor.

They are often the stewards of livestock as well as of game, so they feed us. They’re living through these cycles of birth and death and represent the kind of vegetative death and rebirth that occurs with the turning of the tides of the season. When we work with ammonite, it brings us into such deep communion with the elementals, with the consciousness of the stones, with the very spirits, the soul of mother earth beneath us. And even for a lot of modern mystics who explore earth energies, the symbol of the spiral is how we visualize those intersecting lines of force like the vortices that we see in Glastonbury or Sedona or Stonehenge or anywhere else in the world where these Earth energies converge. And it creates a really dynamic stone that is born of such humble origins.

These are such incredible stones that symbolize birth and movement and change and transformation just like Kyle was talking about. I almost love to think of them as a spiral labyrinth, and I will use them as a kind of finger labyrinth in meditation. If you’ve got one that’s you know, doesn’t have to be this big, but one that’s big enough that you can follow the lines. Even if it’s been cut in half and polished, they work so well. You can put all your attention right on the fingers as you trace inwards toward the center, imagining that you’re kind of contracting your awareness to the core of your being, descending into that subconscious state to touch and see and and experience everything that we kind of sweep under the rug.

We can reverse the spiral and start from the inwards and move outwards to have an expansive effect on our consciousness either to come back to our normal state after we’ve we’ve gone inwards or when we’re in our normal state to go into that state of the superconsciousness, the higher self, the divine self, to get that kind of eagle eye view, and and see everything happening at life and understand how the parts and pieces come together. And, another practice that may be truly ancient, is using them as dreamstones, not just because Pliny the Elder talks about them, but there is one other famous occurrence of them in Somerset, and that is in a place called Abilene’s Hole, and it’s in the Mendip Hills, which produced some incredible rocks that maybe we’ll talk about another week very soon. But there were a series of remains that were found there of individuals that lived over 10,000 ago. And among some of the skull, there are fragments of seven different ammonites seemingly placed beneath their heads. One of my favorite authors in the world of earth science is a guy by the name of Ken McNamara, and he writes about this occurrence in one of his books and suggests the stones might have been placed under the heads of the deceased as these kind of tokens of dreaming their way into the other world.

Not just putting them under our own pillows for our own dream time journeys, but it’s as if they open portals to all the other realms. So if we wanna commune with the ancestors, the gods, our higher self, our personal spirits and guides and guardians, the beings in the land, the consciousness of the land itself, Ammonite is there to help us forge those connections and tend to them to keep them going ever onward to nourish us each and every day.

Adam: Nicholas, I love what you’re saying about the meditation with, you know, tracing with your finger. I think that’s a really great practice for people to do. As you’re talking about the haunted gods and their connection to the haunted gods around the regions, would you say that Ammonites have a yang energy or a more masculine energy?

Nicholas: Not necessarily. There are just as many instances of connecting them to figures of the defined feminine. We find churches in Italy where the amenitized red marble, it’s really limestone, is placed distinctly at her feet when she’s carved stepping on a serpent. We find instances of female saints like Saint Hilda performing miracles, and that may actually be a kind of memory that links the serpent to a very, very ancient idea of the goddess as the earth mother. The word serpent is ultimately related to a root that means something that crawls along the ground.

This is actually a reference to another earth goddess we might know. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the myths of Persephone, who is, we’ll say, very salient around the turning of the seasons. But in Latin, her name is from the same root of or serpent. So, yeah, I think this is a both and kind of stone, not just one or the other, but has the option to be a portal to either ends of that spectrum or anywhere in between.

Ashley: I wanted to jump in with something that you, like, just touched on, Nicholas, like, just in passing, which is you mentioned, like, there were a lot of thoughts about these being very magical before we understood the process of fossilization. And I think it’s really important to kinda touch on the fact that, like, we have really only understood that process for less than two hundred years. I mean, this is, like, very recent. There were these oddities, curiosities, anomalies. So it’s kind of no wonder people thought that they had these magical qualities from, like, thousands of years ago, very ancient peoples, to, like, more modern kind of folk magic type charms.

This is a, yeah, like, such a long standing part of our history is connecting with these stones this way. Absolutely.

Nicholas: And really And I also

Ashley: oh, sorry. I have, like, one quick show and tell. My grandpa gave me this recently. It is an ancient Roman coin. It was one of the only ones that he kept in his collection still, and you are not going to believe it, but it depicts I don’t know if you can see the horns, the spiral horns.

So, for those of you watching the video, this is on my little ancestor altar with my ammonites.

Nicholas: That’s incredible. I love that.

Adam: That is very cool indeed. I love this. As we’ve been talking, you know, we it’s almost as though it feels like the ammonites have a and I’m I’m sure this is an absolutely correct, but it feels like they just have this real ancient energy about them and that they’ve been, you know, celebrated for such a long time. One of the things I love to work with is the chakras and everyone knows the chakras and the main seven, but there has been some expansion of the concept of the chakras over the last few decades as our consciousness has risen. Now these are a little bit more ambiguous, and it’s really hard to try and find a universal set where one type.

Right? These are the extra chakras beyond the seven and that type of thing. But I think if we go lower so we’ve got our base chakra, which is to do very much with, do we feel safe? Do we feel secure? Can we provide for our basic needs and that type of thing?

And they won’t resonate with that. And you know, like my red amylites that I’m wearing today, I think it could possibly work with that. But then the next chakra that’s normally connected to going lower is known as the earth star chakra. Now whereas the base chakra is about your relationship with just kind of fit your connection to the earth and how you feel, The earth star chakra is your relationship with the earth, every other human, every animal, every plant, and every rock, every mountain, everything. And how connected you feel?

And, obviously, as we evolve over these last few decades and so on, we’ve become a lot more conscious of our impact on the Earth. Probably in the nineteen fifties and sixties, the large majority of people were just going about their lives and didn’t worry about things like climate change or polluting the oceans or different things like that. But we’ve become more in tune with mother earth. And, you know, obviously, there are civilizations and cultures all around the world, a lot of the indigenous cultures that are a lot more in tune with the earth, but a lot of people didn’t have that connection. And I think the earth star chakra really helps with that.

But then as we go a little bit lower so the earth star chakra is said to be about, few inches or 30 centimeters below our feet, normally resonates with the color like an earthy reddy brown. But then we go below that, and there’s another chakra that people refer to, and I refer to it in my latest book called the incarnator chakra. So the incarnation of chakra still has this concept of our connection to people, planet Earth, you know, animals, plants, and so on. But it goes beyond just your connection right here. And now it goes through space and time.

So the incarnated chakra is often associated with your connection to your tribe, your ancestors, your clan. And there are, you know, there are theories. Obviously, we have our bloodline, which is kind of where our body is passed on from generation to generation, but there’s also our spiritual ancestry as well. And I find it really interesting. Why is it that for someone like myself that has European ancestry has a drawing to other cultures around the world.

You know, Egyptian mythology really appeals to me and, you know, some of the North American kind of background also interests me as well. Was it possible, and we’re not gonna solve this question in this episode, but was it possible that we lived other lifetimes in other parts of the world? And I think ammonites would be a really great one for helping you to connect with that ancient aspect of yourself because sometimes that can be comforting. Sometimes we can find power in that, and we can also, draw on that, for allowing us to navigate through our lives in this present. So I think this would be a really great one for exploring both the Earth Star chakra and the incarnated chakra.

And I would suggest just simple meditation. I love what Nicholas said about, you know, the drawing of the finger going in or coming out. Or another one is to simply place it, place an ammonite about 30 centimetres to six inches, below your feet, and kind of feel that connection with the earth and see what comes up for you as well. So that could be another practical way to working with this stone or this fossil, I guess we should say, Ashley, what about yourself? You’re always good for some practical ways of using these.

How do you use ammonites?

Ashley: I love this stone for a bit of kitchen witchery and hearth magic. This is something I’ve talked about a little bit before in previous episodes. I’m really big on this practice because, you know, most of us, we end up spending a decent amount of time in the kitchen each week, so you might as well take some of that mundane kind of day to day sort of tasks and make them a little bit magical. So as Nicholas mentioned, ammonite fossils were found at Glastonbury Tour and Glastonbury is often said to be the heart of the world. And so if we look at that as sort of the macrocosm on the microcosm on a smaller level, our kitchen is usually the heart of the home.

This is where we prepare meals and we nourish ourselves and our loved ones. This is where great conversation happens. It’s also, you know, this very fiery, energizing, transformative space. So ammonites kind of exemplify this as above, so below in terms of the fossil world. So for kitchen magic, we have the spiral form of ammonite, and I have one of these little Whitby snake stone ammonites also, which Nicholas and I got together a couple years ago.

These are from Whitby in Yorkshire in The UK, and Nicholas actually also mentioned Saint Hilda. And when these ammonite fossils were found in Whitby, it was thought that they were basically like petrified snakes that Saint Hilda had turned to stone. So, again, before that understanding of fossil fossilization like Nicholas mentioned. So this spiral energy is something that we, I think, really can tap into in the kitchen. This energy really represents transformation.

The symbol of the spiral represents transformation. And so it’s mirrored in the cauldron, in the cooking pot, the place where we perform, you know, these daily bits of alchemy, transforming something, like all these raw ingredients into a beautiful soup or a casserole or whatever it is. But creating all these nourishing dishes from little bits of the earth that we’ve gathered up together and put into our cooking pot, into our cauldron. So this spiral form is representative of that alchemy and that transformation, but it’s also mirrored in the way in which we stir the cauldron, and we create that sort of spiral of energy and magic. So one of my favorite practical ways to work with ammonite, and this is one that I talk about in my fossils for hearth magic and kitchen witchery class, is to have your trusty wooden spoon.

Most of us who spend a good amount of time in the kitchen have a favorite wooden spoon or maybe that’s my neurodivergent showing, but I have a favorite wooden spoon for sure. And, one of the things I like to do is place my wooden spoon on my kitchen altar and in the hollow of the spoon, the little bowl of the spoon, place your ammonite fossil right in the hollow of that spoon and let it charge up on your altar overnight because it’s sort of imbuing that spoon now as a magical tool with that transformative spiral energy of the ammonite. So now when you stir that pot and brew that magic, you have this kind of enchanted tool, which becomes like the kitchen witch’s wand in a way. And so after you charge that spoon with the ammonite, I recommend, like, painting or drawing a little spiral on your the handle of your spoon, not in the part that’s gonna go in your food, but on the handle of your spoon so you know this one has been magically charged up, and you can find your extra special spoon for cooking up some magic. You can also wood burn this in.

Mine is kind of coming off just from washing, and you can recharge this anytime you like. Just put it back on your kitchen altar with your ammonite fossil overnight and let it charge back up.

Adam: Thank you so much for sharing that, Ashley. I must admit that’s such a beautiful way to talk about the wooden spoon because the last woman who was wielding a wooden spoon was my mother. Because when we used to get misbehaved, one of them would go across the backside. So that’s gonna heal a bit of past trauma out there as well. I’d love to ask, both Nicholas and Ashley.

We’ve obviously talked a little bit about fossils and we’ve obviously zoned in and talked a lot about ammonites. And when we talk about fossilized things, there’s obviously things like amber and jet and petrified wood as well. But there are all these others and, Kyle, you would have seen them where you work as well. All these other little critters and things that have been caught in stone, and some of them look like what we call here in Australia, splaters and things like that. Do you work with, I think they’re called trilobites.

There we go. Some of them go ahead. Do you ever work with any of them as well?

Ashley: Yeah. I’ll jump in. I have hundreds of fossils. I love them. They are, to me, the oddities, the curiosities, the remnants of the past.

Just like I love to work with crystals, I also love to work with plants. I think a lot of folks who do a bit of magic might call in the energy of some animal familiars from time to time. Fossils are like the records of the Earth. They’re like they’re the books of the Earth. I don’t know if that makes sense, but they are these amazing record keepers.

And so if I wanna connect with the energy of the plant kingdom, I might pull out one of my favorite fern fossils from Maison Creek. I might pull out some belemnites, some fossil echinoids. There are so many different fossils, and so many of them have, like, the most amazing histories. And the author that Nicholas mentioned, Ken McNamara, Nicholas turned me on to his books. They are so well researched, so full of information and knowledge.

And if you are, like, on the fence about fossils, read any one of Ken’s books, and you’re gonna be, like, head over heels for life.

Nicholas: I also have grown to appreciate fossils quite a bit, but it didn’t start out that way. Honestly, Adam, I was like you. I found them kind of interesting, and there were very few that spoke to me. You know, I think petrified wood is probably the most accessible gem fossil that we get, in crystal stores with the exception of amber and jet, which, I mean, not that long ago, you didn’t find tumbled as often as you do today. And so I kind of got examples of these just so I could have a well rounded crystal collection.

But the first experience I have of a fossil really speaking to me goes back to childhood, and it was visiting my great grandmother’s home on the Gulf Coast Of Florida, and she lived right on the Gulf. And I didn’t really love the seashore there. It wasn’t my favorite beach in my hometown in Southeast Florida. It was rocky and craggy, and the water did different stuff because it was not the open ocean. But when the tide would go out and I would play among the hunks of limestone, I would find all of these curious dome shaped stones with five pointed stars on them, and they were magic.

I still have some of those fossil urchins in my collection today. Some of the ones from those trips to my great grandmother’s home have actually appeared in some of my books. And after, we’ll say, lots of exposure therapy, I started to find other fossils equally as charming, so much so that if I can do just a tiny bit of shameless self promotion in my next book that’s coming out, the witching stones, There there are quite a number of fossils in this book. There’s an entire chapter just about ammonites. There’s a whole chapter on urchins.

There’s a chapter devoted to, amber and jet together. And then there are some other fossils that you’re gonna find in there too because they have such an incredibly long history of this human stone relationship, and it’s that relationship that excites me. And I’m just so glad to see more folks trying to explore that in the modern world.

Kyle: And I really love that we’re still finding new ones. Like, the one that blew my mind recently was the shell. Like, prioritized amylites are so cool, but to see it like an emerald crystal shell, like, that blows my mind. Just research Google. It’s been GIA, like, looked into.

They know exactly what it is. Like, they’re fossil-like, there are crystalized fossils in ways we just don’t even expect.

Adam: Do you think, actually, Nicholas, if someone was, like, okay, I’m gonna give fossils a shot, what would be maybe your top three or four that you think they should maybe try to work with getting a collection, that type of thing? Do you have a list, Ashley?

Ashley: I honestly don’t know if I could choose just three or four. It’s so hard. I really am super partial to the fern fossils from Maison Creek. Like, those to me are just so cool. You have these long little ones that just look like nothing, and they’re often sold in pairs.

And you open them up, and inside, you just see the most beautiful magic, especially if you’re a plant lover. Sometimes you can see so much detail in the leaves of those ferns just completely trapped there. Amazing. I would definitely say ammonite. It is probably my favorite fossil, but ammonite, fossil urchins, and belemnite are kinda like my trifecta of goodness.

Those are the three that I tend to work with the most. But there are some really, really cool things. Like, I have a fossilized piece of an ancient tortoise shell. I have an Oreodont bone, which is really long, almost like a, I don’t know, like a small piece of femur that is very cool. There are just some neat things, but dino eggshell is also really cool for me as, like, a chicken mom.

Like, that appeals to me very much. So, you know, connect with my little dinosaurs out in the backyard. I just think, you know, find the things that you’re really attracted to. It is a world that is equally as big as the world of, like, the crystals that we are also familiar with. There are always new things to explore like Kyle said.

So, yeah, just see what you’re drawn to.

Adam: Nicholas, would you agree with that list, or are there any others you’d throw in after working on it for your next book?

Nicholas: Well, how about one that didn’t make it into the book, and that’s fossil coral. We find this in so many different parts of the world, but as our token Florida resident, it’s one of our most iconic, geologic materials here in the state. We have this gorgeous agatized coral that you can find in places like Tampa Bay and the Withlacoochee River and so many other places, but we’ve got great examples of of fossil corals that come the world over, whether they’re in c two in limestones or we find the agatized versions, the silicified versions in, the Great Lakes here in North America. In Wiltshire, there is a really fun variety of agatized coral that was once known as star flint and astroite because the little polyps resemble the stars of the night sky if we use our imagination. Indonesia produces some incredibly beautiful and colorful fossil coral.

So I think that’s a really accessible one. You can find it in jewelry relatively inexpensively compared to a lot of other things. If we really love gems as well, you certainly couldn’t go wrong with some agatized dinosaur bone, which is also super cool to look at and makes for gorgeous jewelry. I have very, very little of it in my collection, but I think that’s a great one. And, I think probably the only other fossil that gets a lot of attention in, like, day to day life.

I mean, I love them all, but one that I interact with every day. They are the calcitized shells that you find in Florida and also the calcitized fossiliferous limestones that they’re found in. So you can find little whelks and clams, and sometimes they’re not so little. I’ve seen clams as big as my head that are just filled with transparent, lustrous, gold, dog tooth calcite, and they are incredibly fluorescent under an ultraviolet lamp. What’s cooler than a fossil that glows in the dark?

Adam: Well, there is one thing that neither of you mentioned, which I know, Kyle works where I used to work kind of thing, and it’s one of the things that’s always a talking point in the fossil area of the shop where we where we frequent, Kyle, cropolyte.

Kyle: Cropolyte? Yeah.

Adam: Tell us a little bit about that.

Kyle: Fossilized, dinosaur poopies. That’s so funny. I love it. We sell it by the kilo and people come in and it’s like I’ll have half a kilo of fossilized poop thank you very much. It’s brilliant.

The formations are amazing like I think it’s one of the most unique and hilarious things and people buy them as gifts all the time and, yeah, we just have a big tub of it and it makes me giggle every time I walk past and notice one that’s like the perfect shape.

Adam: Oh, honestly, that dinosaur or whatever had had good fiber in their diet. Yeah. Exactly. Well, that may be a crap way to end this episode, but that’s the way we’re gonna do it. Have we won you over when it comes to fossils or not?

We’d love to know by commenting below. And, of course, if you’ve got someone else who you think might enjoy this episode, make sure you send it to them as well as subscribe and like and all those different things. Because when you do that, a dinosaur comes back to life. So join us next week. If Jurassic Park isn’t active yet, it means you haven’t been sharing enough.

We’ll see you then take care and blessed be

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