Lithoscout

Scribbaware

About this app

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.

What’s new

Fixed: on seas with hardly any tide, such as the Baltic (Hiddensee, Rügen), the search conditions could say it was a falling tide but dark, in the middle of the afternoon. These places now show that tides hardly matter there.