About Us
About Florida Seashells and Fossils, LLC. Who are we? What do we offer to fossil and shell collectors?
Sanibel Island, Florida Beach
Welcome to Florida Seashells and Fossils LLC. Our web site has become one of the Premier websites in the world for the Highest Quality Florida Fossil Sea Shells & World Wide Specimen Seashells representing many different families of mollusks. We also offer the finest Florida Extinct & Fossil Corals, Extinct Sea creatures, Marine Invertebrate fossils of all types such as echinoids and even some sharks teeth. Our fossil specimens have been collected from different mines and sites around the Florida Peninsula since the 1960s, see more information on those below. Our experience as amateur paleontologists, geologists, malacologists and conchologists takes us back over 53 years. Many specimens represented here include ones collected not only by our family but also by famous scientists who are academic leaders in the fields of Geology and Paleontology throughout the world. We strive to properly identify each and every specimen with 100% accuracy and offer them in the finest condition available to the collector with excellent collection data. We also take great pride in offering specimen seashells primarily from Florida and the Caribbean, some very rare! However, we also offer a fabulous selection of worldwide specimen & fossil seashells from all over the world!
Our family also has a few artistically talented members that custom make Gorgeous Seashell Mirrors, Collages, Seashell Wreaths and other items out of non-specimen marine and fossil seashells in all different sizes. We carry many shell related items to decorate your home, office or to give as beautiful gift to somebody you love or admire. New items are added almost daily to our web site so come back many times to look! We strive to be different than other web sites and offer 100% customer satisfaction on every purchase and fast one day shipping upon receipt of payment when possible.
Our story actually began In the Mid 1960's when our family found out about an island paradise off the Southwest Coast of Florida named Sanibel Island, Florida. We traveled to Sanibel Island from Chicago,Illinois to see if what friends were telling them about Sanibel was true. We found an unspoiled tropical paradise with lovely plants, birds and many gorgeous beaches filled with hundreds of varieties of unbroken specimen quality seashells of many shapes and colors. Sanibel & it's sister island Captiva got their nick name the "Seashell Islands" many years ago from the pioneers that travelled there to set up a homestead. We quickly fell in love with collecting seashells and started to also make mirrors and other items out of shells. We purchased numerous books on seashells that taught us how to catalog a collection and learned the many names and scientific nomenclature for all the local shells. We decided to look around for a home or condo on the island so that we could winter there and eventually retire on Sanibel. We found a condominium on Middle Gulf Drive for the perfect price with a view of the Sanibel River and right across the street from the beach. We had found the beginning of a lifelong love of seashells and Sanibel and their children would soon follow suit.
Our family traveled often back and forth from Chicago to Sanibel. As time went by their love of seashells grew into blue ribbons won for scintific & artistic exhibits at the Annual Sanibel Shell Show. We were becoming conchologists with wins in many shell shows statewide gaining both blue and red ribbons.
In 1979, our family moved down to Florida permenantly and took up residence on Sanibel. During that time our family would often take sight seeing drives down the state roads leading to Labelle and other Central Florida areas. One day we found a large pit on the side of the road being excavated. There we noticed Florida Fossil Shells that they had seen along the banks of the Caloosahatchee river but many more types that no longer existed or were extinct. Some shells were fossils of what were currently being found on Sanibel and others from purchasing books and doing research proved to be extinct for millions of years! Our family was now hooked on Florida Fossil shells also. Our family has made trips all over the state of Florida to collect Pleistocene to Eocene aged fossils and seashells. Great fossil vertebrate finds were also made during several of these trips. Trips to such mines as Apac in Sarasota, Alum Bluff, Ten Mile Creek in the Chipola Formation, Ruck's Pit, Rinker Pit, Brantley pit, Farabee Pit, Panther Pit, Bonita Pit and many, many others fueled our family field trips. Our family now collecting Florida Specimen Seashells & Fossils decided to start travelling to the Caribbean and overseas to other destinations to get specimens from all over the world. Our families 53 year history of shell & fossil collecting brought us to want to enter into the specimen seashell & fossil business on a permanent basis. Again welcome to Florida Seashells and Fossils LLC founded in 2014
Yours Truly,
Melanie, Betty, Louise & Family
Florida Seashells and Fossils LLC
