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I found this tooth in a cave in southern Missouri. It's obviously very old. We found this sitting on the surface, but with some digging we found bones from deer and other mammals. I can't tell if this is a bison tooth or just an old cow tooth.

I have been planning to go out to the bison site today to see if I could find any pieces of bison in the collapsed material from the bank. I got ready and loaded my car. When I opened the garage to leave I realized there was a steady rain. I can handle a steady rain, but not when it is in the 30upops. High 40s is kind of my limit. I closed the garage and went back inside. The forecast the day before hadn’t mentioned rain. I looked up the weather. It said the rain would diminish to 20% at 2:00. I determined I’d go then. I got on the road and halfway there it broke out into a fairly heavy rain again. I decided to continue on. This is a view of the area. The bison site is in the creek beyond the tree line. When I got there it was in the mid 30s with a slight drizzle. Needless to say I’ve had better conditions for fossil hunting. I got my boots on and grabbed my gear and headed out. As I rounded the corner to where I’d get on the trail I saw a coyote come trotting out of the forest into the clearing in front of me. He saw me and ran off some distance. I stopped in my tracks. I wanted to enjoy the moment and watch him. I pulled out my phone to snap a pic. He stopped on top of a grassy hill and watched me for a bit. Sorry, he was too far away to get a sharp, clear pic. There is some utility pipe in the pic. I love seeing wildlife. Since this site is actually in the city limits there is actually more wildlife than I’d expect to see. There is quite a bit of undeveloped land in the area though. This is the area of the bison site. It’s a beautiful shady spot with the water running over rocks. So you get the delightful sound of creek water flowing. I put down my gear and determined where I was going to start. I bought the screen I built, but J was pretty sure it would not work well with the dirt being wet. It didn’t. So I just determined I was going to dig. I was there for about 2.5 hours or so. I found 3 pieces to my bison. The first was a lumbar vertebrae transverse process. I think I have the vertebrae that it belongs to. Here it is after I uncovered it. The next was the patella. I was sitting in the same spot as when I found the piece above, which happened to be right below where the femur was. I looked up and saw something in the bank. I forgot to take a pic. It was actually right where it should have been. This is the femur. The Tibia is to the left of it, perpendicular to it. With the way they are oriented I assumed the patella had been lost, but it was deeper in the bank there where the two bones met. I worked there a bit longer with no success. So I moved to the left when I came across this. To the left of my very muddy chisel you can see a hint of red. It’s a phalange or phalanx. I haven’t looked at it to determine which. I worked a bit bit longer with no success. My arms were tired. Because the dirt was wet almost every swing or every other swing of my tool I had to stop and remove the clump stuck to it. I decided to walk down the creek a bit. I had planned to walk to the high bank and look for fish fossils, but my socks kept slipping off my foot. It was very annoying. So o decided to not walk down the creek that far. I found a piece of turtle bone a piece of turtle bone almost exactly where the horse bone had been. I am falling asleep trying to type this trip report. I’ll post pics of them cleaned up tomorrow and finish my story.

Good evening fossil folks, I found a small bone on a Tampa Bay beach on the west coast of Florida. After doing some research I saw similarities to a cave bear toe bone and/or bison. It's approximately 1" x 3/4" and very worn with a baseline crack. I have 7 photos of different angles. Can you ID? Thanks all!

I was thinking I could keep a running update on my bison prep, discoveries in learning, general happenings. . . Maybe a bit like Ralph’s aka Nimravis’ “Sometimes You Have to Whack It”, only my bison prep style if it isn’t too dull and boring. A recap. I found an almost complete, articulated bison with the skull in January 2019. I have collected the majority of it. I’m working on processing stuff still and prepping it. I’m totally new to vertebrate paleontology type stuff. So there is a big learning curve. I still have bits sitting in bags or small plastic boxes that I haven’t processed and removed the dirt from. That stuff is still moist for the most part. This post will be embarrassingly honest at times about how I messed up something out of sheer ignorance or how something didn’t work as planned. I’m not beating myself up over anything. Lesson learned and I move on all the wiser. I’ll be sharing my trials and errors for 2 or 3 reasons. 1. So someone else will know what worked or didn’t. 2. Hopefully give others the courage or motivation to just try and not be afraid to make mistakes. 3. Show how blond I really am. Noooo! Not really. 4. So others with more experience can chip in and give me guidance and insight. One thing I found out the wrong way is when you rinse the bones off with water and then let them dry, you’re not supposed to get them wet with water again. Never ever. I had no clue, but it makes sense. These specific type of bones are still like very old bone with little to no mineralization. So they’re fragile. When I rinsed the dirt and mud off I did a general, not a thorough cleaning where I got all the dirt out of the nooks and crannies. So I took one of the femurs that had thoroughly dried and went to rinse it again and clean the nitty gritty parts. After I was done I had it sitting next to me on the couch when I heard a very loud crack noise come from the bone! That was not good! I couldn’t find a crack, but clearly somewhere inside a crack had occurred. It was because the bone was dry. When wet it adsorbed the water, swelled and cracked. So no water. If I had known that I would have been more thorough on the initial cleaning.

I have spent more dollars on my pet bison than I have ever spent on fossil related tools. I’ve purchased: - A poster on bovine skull anatomy. I couldn’t find a decent free one online. - Butvar 76 - Paraloid B72 (auto correct kept wanting to “paranoid” LOL) - Cyanoacrylate (More of it. Ran out during extraction) - A couple books. One is on “consolidants, adhesives and coatings” in conservation. It is somewhat more technical than what I was expecting. Not beyond my comprehension, but definitely a more in-depth study kind of read. Its detailed chemistry of all the materials we hear about and use. Including those listed above. The Cow and Bison book by Finsley And now what every gal with a pet bison needs is: I’m definitely going to need this when I go trying to prep the skull.

I made a trip to bison creek yesterday. Not it’s real name, but where I found the bison. So it seems an apt name. I packed my backpack and hip waders in my trunk and headed out. I got a half mile down the road and realized I’d forgotten to bring a change of pants. I told myself “I’m running late. I’ve got my hip waders to cover my pants. I’ll be fine. I only had 2.5 hours to explore, splash around the creek and play with any new fossils or rocks I might find of interest. I needed to leave by 3:00 so I could go to a send off party for a friend who is going to go minister to the Lakota tribe in South Dakota for 2 years and hopefully establish a thriving Celebrate Recovery group there. Anyway, as I was putting on my waders I could see sunlight passing through in a few places. I guess they weren’t made for kneeling and digging and excavating fossils. I got my gear and headed down to the creek. It was bright and sunny and in the low 50s. Great weather for hunting. I stopped by the bison dig on my way downstream. The last cavity I had dug the articulated leg out of had collapsed in on itself. We had rain one day last week so I’m sure that helped it along. I thought I’d dig through some of the old collapsed dirt where I’d found bones before. I found one more vert. Hard to tell, but there is bone there. I moved on down the creek. There aren’t many obvious fossils in the creek, but there are lots of cool rocks, concretions and minerals. If you know me I’m fascinated with concretion. Here is a view of the creek. Notice the layers on the right. The gray extends 3-4 feet up into the bank. Then the Pleistocene layer begins. There is s small tan layer. I think the Pleistocene begins above that. Here is a cool looking septarian concretion. I call these turtle rocks. They’re aren’t turtles, but that’s what they reminded me of. It has strong mineral veins of brown, most likely aragonite running through it. The other side. I like the richness of color. It’s probably just iron stain, but I like it. Most septarians around these parts are a dull gray. I walked a little further and came to this part of the creek with a high bank. This area seems to be a geological irregularity of some kind. This may be one of those instances where it lies in unconformity or something like that. I know for sure the dark gray is Eagle Ford Group, Arcadia Park Formation I believe. The light layer above it up to the next gray layer is either Austin Chalk or Eagle Ford. It could be a layer of Austin Chalk, which becomes more dominant to the east. The Austin Chalk overlays the Eagle Ford. Then above the tan a thin layer of gray where it is Pleistocene. The tan layer thins out to the right and disappears altogether a few feet to the right of the pic. There is a big chunk of light gray shale that had fallen from the bank. Concretions are scattered along inside the bank. Some quite large, very cool and pretty. There are frequent avalanches and here you see evidence of that on the left. There is a concretion in the creek probably from the avalanche. I think I’d be just as happy sitting curiously breaking open the concretions and studying them. They’re just fascinating! Of course then I’d want to take them all home. The creek bed is a slippery shale. I think this is so cool looking! The cavities are filled with a druzy type calcite with some aragonite too. I’m not use to seeing small little ones like that. The ones I find near Dallas are huge and not druzy. The size of these overall though are huge. Here is s close up of part of it. I didn’t attempt to take any of it. I couldn’t carry it, but it sure is pretty. Also, this is s high avalanche risk area. It concerns me more than the NSR in terms ov avalanche risk. In this area there are lots of minerals oozing out in places. It colors in the shale. I have been told there is fish fossil material in this creek. I haven’t found the exposure yet though. This piece on the bottom right looked fishy to me. There are other parts that looked like it had scales and also the pattern of fish scales was scattered across the piece at the top center. I’m not sure what it is. It is in fine delicate shale though. There was this white gelatinous substance that looked to be oozing out of the rocks in places. Very weird looking. I don’t recall seeing such a thing before. The bank is streaked with minerals that have been in solution and flowed down. Some looks like sulfur yellow. Some orange and white. There are also fine calcite and possibly gypsum crystals in the layers. Some like fine needles. They may be some other mineral too. Anyone know what the white stuff is? It was oozing out of a long vein across the creek. There was another area where the rock and water were stained orange from what looked like iron leaching out. This septarian is over 5 feet long. I moved on down the creek. There was a large gravel bar just down the creek filled with septarian nodules both whole and fragments. This one isn’t too pretty, but I think it has potential. Maybe a weak acid wash would brighten it up. It looked predominantly aragonite. You don’t see many like that this big. I kept moving. On my left was a sand bar where the Pleistocene layer was at the surface. I spotted an odd looking thing that looked a bit like an exposed root. I went to check it out. Woohoo! A bone or a fragment of one. I put down my pack and pulled out my chisel to remove the dirt around it. Bones can be fragile. I could just pull it out, but I risk breaking and losing some of it. So I always dig around bones or fossils to free them up before pulling them out. It kind of looks like the distal end of a humerus, but I’m not sure from what. The epicondyles are broken off the other side and it’s pretty worn. Ill post more later. I’m not half done yet.

Hello I found this sticking out of a wall alongside a creek here in Travis county, Texas. I was hoping to get the specific type of vertebra this is and maybe what it belonged to. Thanks

This bone was found at Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island about 2 months ago. Could you please help me identify what it is and age? I am a sheller and I am finding some fossils lately and I don't know anything about them, so I really appreciate any help. Thanks so much. (I am calling this a caudal because that is the guess my brother made)

Hey everyone! Here is the new look of the Cave Lion! With smaller mane as u see. This is something new for me,to draw animal in the other position.Also, at the end of the paper is a bison skull, example of his diet. Enjoy Darko

I took some pictures of all the bison leg bones last night. After I was done taking pictures I was sitting on the couch next to where the were on the floor. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something odd that I hadn’t noticed before. There are lots of chips and breaks on these bones and I have just passed them all off just breaks, however this one is different. Have a look and tell me what you think. It kind of looks like something took a bite out of it. This is the angle that caught my eye. It is the lower end of the femur. The lateral epicondyle. If the bison were standing this would have been a bite to the back inside edge of the knee, kind of where the hamstring would attach in a human. It would be a good way to take a large animal down. Take note of the bottom edge. That is the lateral epicondyle. To the right of the big chunk missing there is a cluster of 4 small punctures into the bone. On the medial epicondyle there is another cluster of 4 puncture marks into the bone. To the right of them is a gouge in the bone. Close up pics below. Lateral condyle. Note the 4 punctures and possibly a 5th or it didn’t quite get a grip and it slid or something. Lateral condyle surface. You can see there is another puncture mark top left near the break (gray with mud in it). The other little holes are where blood vessels passed into the bone. The hole I speak of is a bigger hole with 2 tiny holes on its edge at about 3 and 4 o’clock. I probably should have put arrows or a circle. Diagram of human femur blood vasculature from googling so you can understand bone vasculature. The veins shown in the diagram are larger ones. There would be many little ones as well. That’s what all the holes are in the pic above, besides the largest hole on top left near break. A little bone anatomy explanation. The broken edge at back you’re looking upon is the lateral condyle. You can see the 4 puncture marks there. The other side facing away is the lateral epicondyle. The inside edges are condyles. The outside edges of these structures are epicondyles. The edge closest is the medial epicondyle. It also has 4 puncture marks and a gouge. This shot is ooking down on the break. It is a different texture than parts of the bones I have found that broke recently from falling off the bank, broken while in situ prior to extraction, broken during extraction. . . So the break happened a while back postmortem and had time to weather and smooth the bone a little or it happened while the animal was alive and it didn’t die immediately and the body tried to heal a little. I don’t know which. I tend to think the latter. This is the other femur for comparison that looks completely healthy (besides being dead). That remind me me of Bones from the original Star Trek. “It’s dead Jim. I’m a doctor not a magician.” Or something along those lines. Close set up of the marks on the medial epicondyle. If the marks are from a bite mark, it’s a strange tooth pattern. Puncture marks on the lateral condyle surface. What do do you all think? Maybe cleaning out the puncture marks better would shed more light. Thoughts and comments would be appreciated.

I have a few mystery bones from my bison that I don’t know what they are. I’m hoping some of you will know. I found this Monday in situ with bones. It doesn’t have the same texture as the other bones. It feels very different. It was found near the scapula if that is of any help. It kind of has an epiphyseal feel to it so I’m wondering if it’s ossified cartilage, but from where I’m not sure. These are all pics of the same thing from different angles. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Today was Martin Luther King day. I had the day off of work. So I slept in and then I got ready, packed my gear and headed back out to the bison site. It was bright and sunny, but 40 degrees with the wind blowing hard. Thankfully I would be down in the creek and the wind would not be much of an issue. There were a few more exposed bones I wanted to collect. One exposed bone was long and thin. I thought it was part of a thoracic vertebra. Just to the right of it was the edge of a very wide and flat bone. The first bone lay diagonal across part of the top of the second bone. I began to remove dirt and realized the wide flat bone was very fragile and broken in many places. This was not going to turn out well for that bone. Here is a pic of the situation. I don't think you can see all the breaks, but they’re there. The long thin bone is to the left. It started about 1.5 to 2 cm wide and 0.5 thick, but quickly broaden and got thicker. I couldn’t tell what it was. I think both scapula may be present, but I didn’t expose them to try to figure that out. I assumed the wide flat bone was a scapula, but I’m not terribly familiar with bovid anatomy so I wasn’t completely sure how long and wide it was supposed to be. I kept digging back into the bank to excavate it, but it seemed unending and quite large. This is the cavity after digging a while. The humerus on the left and the scapula on the right. I think they were actually articulated together, but at a distorted angle. I traced the other bone back and hit another large bone behind it. I tried to go around the other side of the scapula to pedestal it, but I hit bone there too. I am a complete novice with using Butvar 76, but I had received some on Saturday in the mail. Before I left home I decided to make a 50% solution to use to hold stuff together in the field rather than the cyanoacrylate. I knew the bond wouldn’t be strong, but hoped it would help hold stuff in place for transporting back to my house. I knew the scapula was not going to go well at all. It was fractured in dozens of pieces. I chose to pour the 50% solution over it and let it dry before attempting to move it. I walked over to there the end of the tibia was sticking out of the bank. This is the end of it in pic below. The femur was at a 90 degrees angle to it and articulated. I removed the femur on 1/13, but knew I’d have to come back for the tibia. There was another bone to the right of the tibia. I couldn’t tell what it was until I removed it from the bank. It turned out very cute little caudal vertebra. Ugg it is telling me I cannot upload more pics. I sent myself 7 pics and chose 1.8 mb for size. I'll post more in a minute.

Found this tooth while ago.Still not sure to which animal this belongs to.I know that it could be one od these two : Bison or Cow.I Found it last year in a Stream in the middle of the forest when i was looking for Oysters (Gryphea gingensis) in Paraćin,Serbia.People do not live near that forest but maybe they lived in some past.

I can’t be 100 percent sure of the age of the deposit from where these Bison tooth came from. But it would almost certainly fall into a late Holocene early Pleistocene era. Continued :

Complete prehistoric buffalo skull found in Cambridgeshire quarry by Jamie from Fossils Galore in March By Sarah Cliss Fenland Citizen, January 16, 2019 https://www.fenlandcitizen.co.uk/news/complete-prehistoric-buffalo-skull-found-in-cambridgeshire-quarry-by-jamie-from-fossils-galore-in-march-9059305/ Yours, Paul H.

Does anyone have any info for how to determine a species of bison? I have a mandible with teeth and many of the other bones. I have the full skull too, but no horns. I haven’t prepped the skull yet. That’s going to take me months probably. Here is a lower right mandible with a radius. A view of the teeth. Thoracic vertebrae. The longest is about 22 inches. Some cervical vertebrae and rib fragments and unknown bone fragment. The atlas and axis vertebrae. A metacarpal Skeleton in situ.

Last June 2018 I stumbled upon the skeleton of a bovid in a creek that was quite old considering it was down 5 feet or so in a bank. I thought it was a cow. I collected the bones that had fallen and a couple that easily came out without any real digging. I brought them home and washed them up and most have been sitting out on my patio under a bit of cover. Last Wednesday night I went to the monthly Dallas Paleontological Society meeting. While there I bought a book on cow and bison fossils. This past Saturday I had a busy morning and afternoon and got home a little after 3:00. I sat down to read the book. It named 3 notable differences between cow and bison bones. I was reading in suspense. I wanted to know if it was cow or bison. Of course I wanted it to be bison, but assumed it was cow. I got to page 10 and the one distinguishing bone I had was a metatarsal. I went and got it and I suddenly realized it was a bison bone!!! ! I had a sudden rush of excitement. My adrenaline was flowing as I flew around the house to change clothes and gather stuff I may need. I did not know what I’d find. For all I knew everything had washed away already. It had been over 7 months. We’ve had lots and lots of rain and numerous flooding events since last June. So I was skeptical. The place is about 40 min from my house. By the time I got everything ready and got there it was almost 4:30. It is about a 10 min walk from where I park my car. I’d never been to the creek in wet season so for all I knew it would be under water. I put on my hip wanders just in case. I got my pack and my garden hoe/claw digging tool. I headed out to the spot. The area above the creek is a flood plane. There was lots of standing water everywhere. When I got into the woods there were 2 nice 8-10 person tents there which appeared to have been vacated rapidly. They were in the flood plane and looked liked they had actually been flooded. No one had returned to take them down. There were hog tracks all over the place and the odor of hog excrement in the air. The forest floor was very mucky. I meandered through the trees and fallen limbs. The forest was fairly wide open with very little underbrush. I came to a point where I had to turn right to be able to find a point of access to the creek. The banks are 10 to 20 feet or more high depending upon where you’re at in the creek. The bank edge is a straight drop down into the creek so you can’t enter just anywhere. I came to a spot where there was a 3 foot drop with a tangle of roots where I could get down to a lower level and then into the creek. Then there was a hill so I sat down to scoot over the edge and then walked carefully down the hill. From there it was a short distance to the creek. Then I turned to walk down steam. I came around the bend in the creek and saw this. If you look closely you can see a large whitish object. That is the bison skull. To the left were thoracic vertebra and to the right were cervical vertebrae. Go figure that one out. Then there were some ribs and the edge of other bones and then another 5 feet down on the right was a femur. It was pretty chilly. In the low 40s with a stiff wind. Although down in the creek I was protected from the wind. I put down my pack and took out my gloves and a chisel to probe the dirt with and pull some of it away. The base of both horns were present, but no sign of the whole horns. A tip of a horn was broken off and sitting in the cavity of the other horn on the right. Otherwise both horns were gone. I carefully lifted the horn tip out and set it aside. Here is the skull with the horn tip on the right. These are thoracic vertebra. There are 6 visible behind the roots. These are cervical vertebra. I think 5 or 6 of them exposed. I uncovered part of the skull to its condition. There were a couple tree roots growing through it and the skull was split in two front to back about where the upper sinus cavities were. There were cracks all over the back and side of the skull. The atlas vertebra was in place with a bone that looked a bit like a broken rib sticking out of it. I didn’t know what was going on there. It seemed fixed in place as if it belonged there. After seeing all the cracks I decided to go back to my car and get the bottle of cyanoacrylate, my head lamp and something to drink. I grabbed a couple plastic bags and a small plastic box. I hurried back to begin the task of excavating the vertebrae and begin pedestaling the skull. I was in for a lot of work and sunset was only 30 minutes away. But I was really hyped about the whole thing. It was more fun and play than work in my eyes. I’ll post more of the story and pics tomorrow.

I bought this fossilized bone at a flea market for my son. I'm not very knowledgeable on the subject but would love to tell him more information about this piece. The original owner did not know what it was, other than suggesting it could be from a woolly mammoth. It measures about 4.5" x 3". The bottom is naturally completely flat with two smaller flat spots nearby. I'd love to learn more about what this could be, some other people have suggested dinosaur but I'm in Florida and I'm not sure if this piece is local or not.