Gosiutichthys Fish Fossil Death Assemblage

Description: Gosiutichthys is a common genus in the Green River Formation, of the family Clupeidae. It gets its name from Gosiute, a Middle Eocene lake where it lived in large schools. It outcrops near the Fontenelle Reservoir and near the Farson Dam. The shales and fossils are not the typical Green River specimens most of us are familiar with. They have a different type of preservation. This plate contains approximately 18 partial to complete specimens. The preservation is excellent, quite aesthetic and displayable. These at one time were readily available to collectors. However, since the closure of the collecting sites they are becoming very hard to find. I was lucky to acquire a small lot of them from an old collection that was liquidated.

This fossil comes from the George Lee Collection of Southern California. Mr. Lee accumulated a virtual where house of fossils over thirty-five years of self-collecting and purchasing. Most of the fossils were acquired during the 1960s through the mid 1990s. Unfortunately, for we collectors, many of these sites and areas are no longer available for collecting. Therefore, many of my offerings are of special importance, as they are now rarely available to the public. Since Mr. Lee’s death, a few years ago, the collection has slowly been liquidated. This fossil came from one of the last available batches sold.