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Pygidium definitely seems like a spot on match, and thanks for linking me to that thread in general, I see a lot of similar butts in there that I had yet to identify from my spot.
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@Petalodus12, fantastic and detailed report, lovely finds - thanks for sharing! Franz Bernhard
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The stuff from the Bearpaw formation no one talks about
FranzBernhard replied to LabRatKing's topic in Member Collections
In your case of fossil wood, a polished section and reflected light microscopy would also be an option. Organic and non-organic constituents can be easily distinguished that way. Yes, that is always a big bonus to have something for comparison . @Norki, @LabRatKing, I am wondering, if any detailed literature exists about fossil wood in the Bearpaw formation. That xylite is quite unusual for Upper Cretaceous sediments, I think. Such fibrous stuff normally still contains some cellulose. Franz Bernhard -
Hi Will, I agree with Al Dente that the more complete tooth is Centrophorus and the isolated crowns might belong to one or two other squaliform sharks. I'm wondering if the more erect crown could belong to Oxynotus which would suggest a Miocene-Pleistocene age. Centrophorus has been reported from all across the Cenozoic of New Zealand. Did you get a locality or any idea of age from your friend? Jess
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What method did you end up going with?
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Park Pilgrimage Produces a Protohadros
Gizmo replied to Captcrunch227's topic in Fossil Hunting Trips
Very nice, congrats! -
Compare with Acanthopyge contusa: Ludvigsen, R. 1979 Fossils of Ontario: Part 1 - The Trilobites. ROM Life Sciences Miscellaneous Publications, 96 pp. PDF LINK
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- west virginia
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I was wondering the same, and thought "nah, that' can't be" Interesting!!
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A few weeks ago I decided to take the kids to my local park. They are building houses in this area and completed a new road which made getting to this park much quicker. Now instead of going way around it's only about a mile from my house and a much more direct shot. On the drive to the park I looked over to my right and saw some red/orange soil. The only color formation in this area is the Woodbine formation. "Odd," I thought. "The nearest Woodbine outcrop on the geological map is miles form here." I told my kids we were gonna make a quick pit stop for 10 minutes or so to explore and pulled into the site. If you've never hunted the Woodbine before, you're missing out. That is if you like torture. Everything is one of 3 shades of brown and finding anything, even an oyster can be a pretty big deal. So as I was walking I saw something odd partially uncovered in the dirt. It was white, black, and was striated. "Well that's odd looking." I put my hat down at the hopeful object, walked to the trunk of the car and got my handy dandy screwdriver, walked back and dug/pried the bone up out of the sandstone. I looked down in shock. I was staring at bone, but not just any bone, based on the size this has to be dinosaur bone . I was instantly flashing back to the conversations I had with my friend earlier this year. He has forgotten more than I ever hope to know. Dinosaurs have never been found as far north in the Dallas/Fort Worth area as my hometown I was told. So the odds of finding dinosaur bone this far north just didn't seem to add up. I grabbed the kids and got them into the car and drove to the park. While they played I sent pictures to my friend, who immediately called me. A few days later we met at the site. The biggest concern: was it was trucked in from another site? A likely and probable scenario that happens all the time around here when construction starts. We went and looked and nope this is all original Woodbine. The huge sand and iron bedrocks made it plain that this stuff wasn't trucked in from out of town. This was the original source. The stratigraphy telling us a beautiful story of an area once composed of sand dunes and river deltas and then repeatedly ravaged by forest fires. So not only had I found a random outcrop of Woodbine where it's "not supposed to be", I'd then randomly stopped at the right spot at this massive site, and then walked right towards the dinosaur bone at this anomalous site. Sometimes it's clear the fossil gods are just smiling down on you. There's just one tiny/HUGE problem though. The bulldozers had already been there. So the bones have been scattered and thrown all over the place and they look like, well like they've been pushed by a bulldozer. This is a blessing and a curse. The bones would have never been found if not for the bulldozer as beforehand this was a pasture. But also it seems like the bulldozer operator really had it out for these bones. They've been through some things. Some terrible, horrible things. So they're ugly, hideous even. But not too ugly that I can't love them and give them a good home. So I went back a few days later and spent a good 3 hours at the site. After several hours of finding nothing at all I began to think that maybe finding the bone was just a one off. I persisted through and was rewarded with finding an interesting bone that was later identified as the top half of a caudal vert. My spirits lifted and I continued on then finding a tiny shard of bone. Not quite what I was hoping for but I'm not gonna look a gift horse in the mouth. I pressed on the last hundred feet hoping to finish that side of the site and i noticed a rock. Yeah just a rock, one of millions out there, but something about this caught my eye and I still can't explain why. I picked up the rock, turned it over, and I was then looking at a wonderful spongy porous structure. While a definitive statement cant be made on this bone, it seems to be a solid match for the end of a lower limb bone. Now full of glee and Christmas Cheer in November, I went home to clean up and gawk at my finds. A few days later I return, this time it wasn't quite as successful. I found another bone shard (meh) and a nice Cretalamna shark tooth. Pretty darn cool find if i might say so myself. Then I keep pushing on and find this little fella lying on the surface. Broken in two just an inch apart. Still no clue as to what part this one is from on the dino. After a break of a few days and doing some research on my finds I return this time with my kids. We spend roughly an hour or so at the site and then decided to call it. Not a single thing did I find. As we head back to the car I tell the kids, "Hey I wanna check this side out real quickly. The last 3 times I've come here I've wanted to check it out but never do." The kids hop in the car and buckle up and I go to explore to see if it's even Woodbine or if it's another formation. Well turns out it is Woodbine. I walk right up to a large bone peeking out of the ground, with two smaller pieces next to it. This turned out to be the superstar find of the bunch. After digging it out, taking it home, cleaning it up, chatting with it, giving it a name (we decided on Woody) I had a few ideas as to what it could be. I sent pictures to my friend Bradley who I jokingly call the Woodbine Wizard because he knows so much about and finds SO many things in the Woodbine. In fact he's the one who trained me on how to hunt in the Woodbine. He looked at it and right away said, "Dude, that's a caudal vertebrae!" A few days later he and my other buddy David came over to my house and the Wizard showed me his perfect caudal vertebrae which we used to compare to what I found. And he's right, I had indeed found what had been my local fossil Holy Grail. Now granted, I would have liked it to have looked a little prettier. But I found a dinosaur vertebrae in my hometown, and a mile from my house! Yeah, I'm not gonna complain about that. So as I mentioned my 2 friends the Woodbine Wizard and David, comes out with me and we take a gander. Let me take a second to tell you how amazing these two dudes are. They come from out of town and want to visit my site to help me find more. They tell me, "anything we find goes directly to you." It's my site and my dino and they're just excited to help out. Let me tell you friends, life is good when you can find some good dudes like that to be your friends. So we spread out and check out the area near where the vertebrae was found. David and I struck out that day but the Woodbine Wizard struck again!. He picks up a PERFECT segment of rib. Initially we all thought it was a modern rib it was so perfect. Absolutely crazy the difference in preservation. Makes me wonder how long some of these other fossils were sitting out exposed to the elements. Or maybe the bulldozer driver doesn't hate ribs as much as he hates vertebrae, limb, and pelvic bones. We'll never know. He also found a beautifully hollow bone preserved in a concretion. Whether or not this is theropod, bird, fish, or what I have no idea. Thanksgiving break, has struck and no school for the kids or teaching for me. So what is the first thing I do with my day off with the kids? That's right! Make the long one mile drive to the site. After an hour of finding a whole lot of nothing, I barely catch something out of the corner of my eye. It is thin and barely exposed. I try to pick it out and it doesn't budge. Okay, I say to myself. I call over my kids (AKA my Camera Crew) and I start digging and they filming. It took a couple of minutes but I end up digging out a scapula blade. Then nearby I find a dozen or so bone shards that had washed down the hill, presumably from said Scapula. At this point I finally email the local university. The response I get is what I thought it would be. The gist was: Thanks for letting me know! Shame it was bulldozed. Keep looking and good work! This is an exciting response for me which you'll see towards the bottom of this article as to my plans for this dino. The next day the Woodbine Wizard shoots me a text, he's going to be in town to see his brother and ask if I am up for a quick hunt at my site. Pssh, does a fat puppy hate fast cars! (In case you're wondering they do indeed hate fast cars). It's misting but armed with hot cocoa for my kids, we brave the weather and it paid off. I find a bone and turn to shout to my buddy, who literally at the EXACT same moment yells out me, "Dude! Bone!" As you might have guessed his find is way better than mine. I found a generic chuck of bone from who knows what, and he finds a beautiful piece of bone set in a larger piece of rock. It turns out this bone is the capitulum to leading into a tuberculum where it broke off. That's fancy talk for it's the straight part at the base of the rib where it connects to the vertebrae. Then a few minutes later he finds another bone. This one has been heavily compressed and fractured. This one I'm not sure on the ID or if we ever will know, but of all the ones with an unknown ID i think this one has the best shot of being identified in the future. So that's it. Today (the day before Thanksgiving 2020) I spent 3 hours at the site and found 2 pieces of coprolite. Not bone or teeth but not nothing either. So you're also probably wondering how I'm able to give an ID based on something that looks like it went through a blender (or in this case, a bulldozer). Well luckily the bones I found give us a rather solid ID. The convex and concave nature of the pubis ventrally and dorsally, the exact match of the scapula regarding shape and angle, the same cross section in rib, and shape of the caudal vertebrae. I've also had a friend who is an expert on the Woodbine look at it as well as a paleontologist from the local university and they also concur. There is also a real lack of diversity of Woodbine fauna (and Appalachia in general it appears). But even more so in the Woodbine. I believe there was a paper by Main in 2013 that stated essentially, if you find dino here in Dallas Fort Worth in the Woodbine, it's probably Protohadros. So that helps to really narrow down the contenders. But the neat thing about Protohadros is that it's a fascinating blend of Iguanodontid and Hadrosauroid characteristics. This shows in the bones making it quite unique without a real possibility of another potential match. So there you have it! That's why I feel fairly confident labeling this Protohadros byrdi. So with the local university deciding it wasn't scientifically important, this allows me to keep it. For those of you that don't know I run a traveling education program called Dino Bo. I do it here locally and I generally stay in the area. This will allow me to keep it and use it as a display for teaching kids here in the community. The impact it will have on children and future generations here in the local community cannot be overstated. The plan is to have a nice display made showing all the bones and their location on the dinosaur. I'm hoping to raise money at some point in the future to pay to prepare a few of these bones for this display. This will further help to reach one of the goals for my program, to get kids interested in science and get them outside. Having a dinosaur found in the very town these kids live in will do wonders for those goals. I'm sure more will be found and I'll continue to update this post as more is found. So stay tuned folks!
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As the OP did not know from which country his grandparents picked up the bones, I think you can spare him, and us, the virtue signaling. If someone posted that his/her grandparents bought some bones during a trip across the US, and that they were from the Central Europe somewhere, would said post have elicited a similar response ?
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hello, I believe the specimen that you have represents an ichnofossil, either repichnia (locomotion trail) or pachichnia (feeding trace). The piece resembles the mudstones/shales common in the strata rather than the bone that you present in a later photo. Note the the trails consist of a paralleled pair lines, some of which overlap one another. The graphic that you included represents an illustration of the rib configuration of an Icarosaurus rather than the crenelations (wrinkles) on an individual rib, which is your last photo.
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Lake texhoma finds(moved from general discussion)
gdsfossil replied to Steedo79's topic in Fossil Hunting Trips
Nice finds. Great photos. Spend the day there today. Found the bivalves and oysters in creeks near the lake, and found some large and tiny ammonites as well. Any tips on what/where to look for the echinoderms would be much appreciated. Heading back soon. Looking at your photos and wondering about what I saw, I was curious- are the tiny ammonites part of a larger animate or are they separate individuals? What does the center of an undamaged large animate look like? Thanks for any wisdom you can provide. -
And this is the entry in the Jasper Burns book
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These are two pygidiums plus their casts. I also see that coral there but I’m ignoring him. He knows what he did.
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Cephalon partial from the needmore near winchester VA, middle Devonian. Looked familiar so I looked it up in the book I remembered it from and it lists it as unidentified, but resembling Lichas. As I was looking at it I noticed below it an illustration that looked just like a couple of tiny partials (pygidiums) I had saved from the same spot. Book lists these as unidentified too, but was published in 1991 so I was wondering if anyone here had any ideas. I’ve found a lot of damaged cephalon partials like this out there so if I know what the rest of the bug looks like, I can maybe keep myself from getting confused if I run into it while looking for something else out there.
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2020 Secret Santa Extravaganza.
snolly50 replied to Tidgy's Dad's topic in Member Fossil Trades Bulletin Board
It was not difficult for you to see through the subterfuge; as you were no doubt aware that snolly's full name is snollygoster. -
Late Pennsylvanian find, Coelacanth or Dipnoan bones?
Petalodus12 replied to Petalodus12's topic in Fossil ID
Thanks! I think I’m leaning towards Coelacanth, too. -
I’m no expert in Newark Supergroup material, but I’d hazard to guess that Icarosaurus material is quite rare (is the type specimen the only specimen known?). Simply due to the extreme rarity of the material I personally would assume it to be trace fossils. This isn’t based heavily on morphology and I have no field experience working with material from those deposits so I’d say wait for replies from other, more experienced members.
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This is the nicest echinoid that I have ever found here in South Texas. It always bugged me that I didn’t clean it up completely but I was scared that I would create more harm than good. After reading other’s post, I decided to go slow and see what I could accomplish. Here are the before and after picture. I think I am now happy with the results. Any further suggestions or am I at a good place?
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2020 Secret Santa Extravaganza.
Tidgy's Dad replied to Tidgy's Dad's topic in Member Fossil Trades Bulletin Board
That's the ticket! -
2020 Secret Santa Extravaganza.
Brett Breakin' Rocks replied to Tidgy's Dad's topic in Member Fossil Trades Bulletin Board
Sorry .. one more detail .. important detail I forgot. The Santa 'Fez' hat ... -
2020 Secret Santa Extravaganza.
Tidgy's Dad replied to Tidgy's Dad's topic in Member Fossil Trades Bulletin Board
It works for me! I think that's brilliant. -
2020 Secret Santa Extravaganza.
Brett Breakin' Rocks replied to Tidgy's Dad's topic in Member Fossil Trades Bulletin Board
Ohh , man .. I like this game. Speaking of discoveries of Adam's inner beauty ... Galapagos turtle or .... ? Hmmm .. not sure this is working for me. Thanks again Adam @Tidgy's Dad for setting this up, I received my parcel and will post this weekend ! Cheers, Brett -
Spectacular entrance. Thank you for sharing.
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Very nice.
