Lithoscout

Lithoscout is a free field companion for everyone who looks for fossils, rocks and minerals, anywhere in the world. Keep a proper logbook of your finds, check whether a beach or quarry is worth a visit today, and work out what you picked up. No account, no ads, no subscriptions. Your finds and their locations stay on your phone.

FIND LOGBOOK
• Sites with a short code, type (beach, quarry, cliff, river, field) and location, private by default
• Finds with kind, group, name, layer or formation, size, condition, notes, photos, position and date
• Catalog numbers made from the site code, like CHR-0001, that never change
• Outings: log a day out, who came along and what you found
• Where each specimen is stored at home: a box, drawer or shelf
• Your collection in numbers, with milestones like your first ammonite
• A private map of your sites and finds

LABELS, REPORTS AND BACKUPS
• Print specimen labels as a PDF sheet (A4 or Letter), with an optional QR code that opens the find
• Share a single find as a PDF report with its photos
• Export everything as a zip with CSV, JSON and photos, or let the app back up to a folder you choose once a month
• Locations are left out of labels, reports and exports unless you switch them on

SEARCH CONDITIONS
• Weather, rain, wind, waves and the tide for each site, with a simple verdict: worth going or not
• Best time to search: the falling tide in daylight, when the sea has just washed new material out
• Safety notes for cliffs and tides, and your own collecting rules per site
• Rock layers under a site and fossils recorded nearby, from open geology databases

IDENTIFY
• A tap-through key that gets you to the right group: 13 fossil groups, the three rock families and 15 common minerals
• Works fully offline and fills in the group of your find
• When the key can't tell, it suggests who to ask

PRIVATE BY DESIGN
• The logbook works offline and is never uploaded anywhere
• Online extras (map background, conditions, geology) stay off until you agree, and only send a position rounded to about a kilometre
• No tracking, no analytics, no cloud backup of your locations

Light and Dark mode. In English and Dutch.

Weather and sea data: Open-Meteo.com (CC BY 4.0). Geology: Macrostrat (CC BY 4.0). Fossil records: Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0). Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.

The tide and conditions are model forecasts and not for navigation. Always check local tide tables, keep away from cliff bases and follow the rules of each site.