Our Full-Service Fossil Collecting Package

Our main operations are based on a full-service package. When we lease a property, we provide all services from prospecting to selling the fossils. Landowners have no costs/fees with this package, instead we offer landowners a percentage of sales. In our experience this creates more revenue for the landowner than just paying for a lease upfront.

Fossil Preparation & National/International Sales

We normally only prepare fossils our group collects. However, on rare occasions we may consider offering a preparation and/or mounting service. Please contact us for more information.
We usually conduct all sales through a broker. We do not offer individual small fossil sales online. If you have an interest in a large specimen project featured on our site, you can contact us for more information. We normally provide clients with a Specimen Prospectus for a project of interest, but the actual sales will go through our broker.

Museums/Public Facilities

If your institution is interested in one of our projects, please let us know. Also, if there is a specific specimen you are looking for from Montana, we can keep you on a list and notify you if we find something that fits your needs.

Fossil Identification

Our fossil identification service is free to landowners.
This service is available only for landowners that have discovered a specimen and are unsure of its identification. If you would like us to help identify a fossil find, send us an email through our "Contact Us" page with "MT Fossil I.D." in the subject line. Please include the following information.
  1. Montana County of Origin
  2. Several images of the fossil with a ruler or tape (inches) for scale in the picture.
  3. Assurance that it is on or from deeded property. If you are not sure, you can use MTCadastral (link below), send us a GPS location, or Township, Section, Range information. We do not require exact location, only the general area to figure out what formation you are in.
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Legal Commercial Collecting

For a commercial company like ours, we are restricted to collecting on deeded land only. A landowner can use:
http://svc.mt.gov/msl/mtcadastral/
This site can let you know if a location is on your property and ensure it is not on public lands. Most phones have a gps location app that can help you do this.

 

Our Full Service

With our full service, we provide all equipment needed to do any size job. Our experienced team has thousands of hours doing this task. We also pay attention to record the scientific information for each project to ensure public institutions will have an interest in every specimen. Without this, most academic institutions cannot utilize a specimen for research or display.
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When You Contact Us

Please only contact us if you are interested in one of our services. For a possible fossil discovery on your property, we will email you a more detailed list of what we require to help you. We specialize in fossils from Montana but have worked in neighboring states. We utilize the Montana Geologic Map to identify which formation is in your area. There are several formations within Montana that contain different fossils, this is why we need at least county information to help in the identification. We also focus on dinosaur fossils and tend not to deal with marine fossils because the value in most cases are not worth our companies efforts, they are still neat though. We strive to help all landowners realize income from their fossils, we offer the identification at no costs and the landowner is not required to contract with us for this service. We also tend not to value a fossil site from what we see in a picture, this is very difficult to do. It will depend on how much of the specimen in there and the quality of preservation among other things.
Please don't hesitate to contact us if you are a landowner with a possible fossil site on your property. We are here to help all landowners in Montana and neighboring states. Just understand we may not be able to identify something right away with pictures if the quality is poor or very little is available to picture. We will try our best to help and to guide you through the identification process. If you decide to hire a different company for more details or excavation, that is fine with us.
Please do not contact us for fossil identification if you are not the landowner where the fossil originated from. Also, please ensure it is from deeded land. If a fossil has been removed from its original location and has no documentation where it was collected, we cannot offer any services for that fossil. Disturbing a fossil from Federal or State Lands is illegal unless you have a permit from those entities. Those permits are reserved for academic/public institutions.

Preparation Facility Build-Out and Staff Training Services:

CK Preparations has had the honor to work on some of the best dinosaur specimens in the word. During our career, we have developed a variety of personalized processes and skills to achieve ultimate results in preparation, restoration, molding & casting, and mounting (Or a variation of any listed). On extremely rare occasions, we offer our knowledge and expertise to new organizations wanting to develop a preparation, restoration, molding & casting, and/or mounting facility. We have done this in the past with great results. This service is intended for organizations that have the financial ability to follow our plan in regards to modern high-end equipment, proper lab space, and dedicated personnel that we will train on-site. This is not a service to enter into lightly. On average, this service will require at least 60 days of our time on-site and hundreds of thousands of dollars just for equipment set-up, supplies, and personnel, that does not include our (CK) training time or facility planning and installation of equipment. We prefer to take an empty space and design the facility within it depending on the clients needs. We do not provide the equipment or supplies nor have an interest in the companies that do, we only insist that you purchase the exact equipment and supplies we use to obtain optimal results and the ability for us to train personnel. We are willing to do this service both nationally and internationally. If this service is something you are interested in, you can contact us via email to discuss options. This service is intended for organizations that intend to staff more than 10 people directly working on the fossil areas mentioned above. ckpreparations@yahoo.com

Covid-19- At this point in time, this service is on hold. We still can discuss options and costs at this time but we are not able to travel to your site until the global pandemic situation has stabilized. 4/11/2020