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I posted this originally in the “questions and answers” forum, but I think it fits better under fossil hunting trips since it discusses finds: What are some of the best fossil bones people have dug out of the Aurora Fossil Museum Pungo River dig pits? The actual reject pile DIG PITS, not the mine before it closed. There are some nice fossils to be found there, but I’m curious if anyone has ever managed to find for example a complete rib, or a vert. with all its processes, or a full-on cetacean jaw bone, or by some miracle an entire skull. Most fossils from the pits are somewhat beat up at a minimum, just curious what the ceiling for quality is from the dig pits for bones.

Hunting has been slow for me (Covid has sent a lot of competition out on the beaches!) The photo is from about a dozen trips, several with No teeth. I was lucky to find a few mako teeth, including one massive one at about 2" but tipped. I found less sand tiger spikes than usual, but one pretty cowshark (rare here). Maybe after the holidays I'll get out more. Merry Christmas everyone and good luck even to my "competitors"!

Hi, everyone! Got back to New Jersey on Tuesday, after a weekend at Ernst Quarries. This was my second trip to the site, the first was back in 2018. The weather was perfect- not too hot and cool towards the late afternoon. All three days were pretty well booked, as far as I could tell, but most everyone seems to leave by 1 or 2:00. Met a bunch of great people, and I think I had a really good dig. In the first photo, the top section shows everything I found on Friday and Saturday- all but 2 or 3 from the same hole in the "main" area, including a section of leatherback turtle shell (left side, halfway down) and a sea lion tooth (top row, just right of center). The grid is my cutting board with 1" squares. At the end of the Sunday dig, I was checking out a previously started hole out away from the main site, across the road just before it makes a right turn to wind around to the parking lot, and pretty quickly found a nice Hooked White that, at the time, had a nice blue-grey tint to it. Rob told me that it's probably going to be a pretty good spot and let me park right next to it on the following morning. It was pretty darn good. The bottom section of the photo shows what I found on Monday, all from the same spot and without using a sifter. I stopped using the sifter halfway into Sunday- I just used the fan method with the shovel. I stand above the hole and cut away a section so it falls into the pit and then, one shovel at a time, scoop that up and fan it in my discard pile so I can see what's in it. Not as thorough, but you get through a lot more material, and anything big enough you WILL see. Also, my back was killing me from using the hand held sifters on the previous days. I made a previous post showing that teeth from Ernst don't just glow under long wave uv light (365 nm), but they phosphoresce (glow for a bit after removing the light). None of the teeth from the second site glow at all, except for a couple of the more orange-colored smaller ones in the lower right. Some of the teeth have a nice satiny, slightly pearlescent finish. Can't wait to go back!

At a location, where there is a possibility of finding Miocene fossils, I found this fossil molar. Initially, we considered whether or not it was a Bear_dog molar, but as we left for home, I brought up the possibility of Gomphothere. Prior to sending it to Richard Hulbert for identification, I had searched the internet and believed it looked somewhat like the few examples of Gomphothere milk teeth I could find, including one from the Montbrook site. I note that this tooth at 22 mm APL is at least 30% smaller than any tooth I found for comparison. Richard confirmed that the tooth is Proboscidean, either Mastodon or Gomphothere, but stated that a determination could not be made based on a single tooth. I am ok with the label. A mastodon milk tooth at 22 mm is rare, a Gomphothere milk tooth at 22 mm is very rare. One of those once in a lifetime finds that I am pleased to share with my friends on TFF. Jack

I am on an amazing win streak. Last Friday, I found a very unusual Barnacle fossilized in Silica. Next time out , today!!!! I have been hunting Bone Valley for 13 years and I have never found or seen this tooth. I do not know what it is..... and I broke it digging it out. The root was already broken some many MYAs, but it still does not feel good breaking a once in a lifetime find. My good fortune continued because the broken segment was also in the sieve.. My only thought is that it might be marine mammal. Asking @Boesse and @Harry Pristis to take a look...

Hello! Help please with identification. Is it Galeorhinus? Length ~ 4 mm. Age - Middle Miocene. Location - Western Ukraine. Thanks in advance!

I have found it within Miocene reefal limestones, can you give me any information about its species ? Thank you.

I have found them within Miocene reefal limestones, can you give me any information about their species ? Thank you.

No idea what this is from but it is in really nice shape and completely fossilized. North central Nebraska. Miocene

I was out hunting recently. In addition to numerous small shark teeth, I found a nice posterior Meg, a horse astragulas, and a rostral tooth different from those I had found previously. With friends in the sunshine, it was more than enough. Usually I find Rostral teeth that look like this one from @MarcoSr, although not as perfect... This one looks different.... damage, trick of the lighting.... Thanks for any/all comments. jack

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to meet up with @digit in Gainesville Florida where he very graciously provided my wife and I the opportunity to do some matrix fossil hunting in a local stream. We sieved for a good long time collecting many nice shark and ray teeth as well as other items out of the large portion. At the end we nearly filled a five gallon bucket with gravel that we ran through essentially window screen in the creek to get out the silt and clay. My original trip report can be found here: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/114209-north-florida-fun/&tab=comments#comment-1264293 Back at Ken's house, he was nice enough to sort the bucket of matrix into sizes for ease of picking. We then ran the matrix through 3 stacked sifters since we had already picked out anything caught by the 1/4" screen in the stream. The coarsest material from the sifters would have been caught by the 1/8" screen so (1/4" - 1/8" range). The next finer size range would have been (1/8" - 1/12") and the finest would have been (1/12" - 1/20"). We bagged it up into 3 gallon ziplock bags of coarse matrix, 1 gallon bag of the medium and about 2/3 gallon of the fine matrix. Once home, I dried it out and began the picking and identifying process See some links below for my ID questions and some answers. Thanks to all those that helped. http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/119245-florida-mysteries/&tab=comments#comment-1309402 http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/119097-gainesville-shark-teeth-question/&tab=comments#comment-1305867 http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/119485-small-florida-sharkrayfish-teeth-help/&tab=comments#comment-1310743 So far, all this you have heard or seen before as numerous folks, including Ken, have made many nice posts about sorting and picking matrix for micro-fossils. Some of them are pinned under this Micro topic. What I wanted to impart with this post were the results of my picking efforts, or at least the start of it since I have not gone through all of the matrix by a long shot. But I think I have gone through enough to give a reasonable summary of what can be found in this material. After I have gone through more of it, I can always update the info. You can also search on the forum and find many other excellent posts from members that have looked at this material, but I don't think I have seen a complete summary of what can be found (if I missed it somewhere, sorry). I am not going to post a bunch of pictures of what I found in this thread because I have placed many pictures in an album. Feel free to check it out if interested: My procedure was to pick though the matrix and remove anything that was a fossil, whether I knew what it specifically was or not. After that, the first thing I did was a volume calculation to see what percentage of the matrix is fossil material. Out of the coarsest matrix, the fossils made up 3.2% of the volume, they were a bit less in the medium material (1.9%) and even less in the fine material at 1.1% When you put it all together (remember there is a lot more of the coarse stuff) it comes out to 2.6% of the bucket was fossil material. To me it seems like a small number when I think that in nearly every small scoop I put under the scope I would find numerous fossils. It of course is really only all that interesting if one can compare it to other matrixes, but it gives one an idea of what to expect from this material. My next step was to sort and identify everything. Easy to say, but that was the hardest part since this matrix was new to me. I should be able to do future batches of this stuff much more quickly. Once that was done, I counted the number of specimens of each fossil type and just made a simple spreadsheet of each matrix size. So what did I find? Here is a sample from the coarsest matrix: Keep in mind, most of these fossils are not complete specimens. So for example, while there are 608 Mylobatidae ray teeth, only a small percentage are whole teeth, but if they are in that category there was enough present to be able to ID it. You can see there are over 16% that I know are fossils, but not good enough to be part of one of the listed types or even good enough for me to figure out yet what they are. With more time (and knowledge??) I can probably ID many of those, but that is for another time. Were there differences between the three sizes of matrix? Yes, and I lumped the list of types shown above into broader categories so you can see how the four classes of material (I included the hand collected stuff) compare: And lastly, if you put everything together, you can see what type of fossils you are likely to find in the 2.6% of matrix from the creek: lots of rays, lots of sharks and a smattering of other marine material. That's all. Not sure if anyone else will find this interesting, but I'm sort of a data guy, so it was fun for me to look at it this way. Thanks for looking.