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I found this mammal looking tooth in the Peace River near Arcadia, FL. Just not sure what it is exactly. What i can tell is that it was probably from a mammal... to me, it does resemble a plant eating animals tooth... It didn't look like a Tapir tooth to me... (it certainly wasn't a horse tooth, i found plenty of those) heck maybe it is just a fossil cow tooth or something hehe. But yeah, just thought I'd share it here, see what y'all think. It does seem to have an enamel top part followed by some roots that have been damaged/broken off over the years of fossilization. Hope these pics are ok. Thanks for the help!

A couple of weeks ago I posted a topic about a rodent incisor that I found in the micro-matrix gravel that I collected from the Peace River at the end of the last river fossil hunting season. Consensus had it as an upper incisor due to curvature of the tooth. That topic can be found here for those who missed it the first time: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/47538-micro-matrix-incisor-from-the-peace-river/ While sorting through some of the same batch of micro-matrix I came across something else of interest that stood out from the usual tiny shark, ray, drum, porgy and other fish teeth. It was a tiny mammal molar. I'm still working out a good system for micro photography and my current setup reflects back the lighting too much when I use my millimeter ruler scale so the photos are sans scale. The tooth dimensions are approximately 1.5mm x 3.5mm across the occlusal surface and the length is about 4.5mm long to the extent of the root. Based on the size it had to be from some small rodent so I checked my bible, The Fossil Vertebrates of Florida, to see if I could find a match or at least something similar. From my (extremely limited) understanding of rodent molars, I believe this may be a arvicoline rodent molar as they are characterized by the occlusal surface being composed of a series of "triangles" which this tooth seems to show. The two sinuses (I guess that's the proper term) on either side of the tooth between the three triangular lophes/cones seem to point in the same direction (posteriorly, down in the photo below). The overall shape seems to most closely match the dentition examples shown in Fig. 12.13 [C] on page 235 of the aforementioned book. If this is the case that would make this a right m1 (first lower molar) of Ondatra annectens which is known from the early Pleistocene of Texas. Early Pleistocene would seem to match the age range found in the Peace River and I would expect that rodents (much like today) were generally wide ranging. In fact, consulting the checklist of Florida fossil vertebrates on page 58 shows this species as being known from Florida. This is about the extent of my fossil sluthery skills (actually I'm operating well past the comfort zone of my current knowledge). I don't doubt that there are members on this forum who have a much more comprehensive understanding of the arcane skills of mouse molar morphology. I'd love to hear what others make of this tiny little prize. I apologize for the quality of the photos in advance. I'm still trying to come up with a good system for taking pictures of specimens this tiny. I think I'll need to drop some $$$$ for a nice macro lens for my DSLR. Till then I'm stuck with crummy photos with a lack of depth of field and resolution. Here are the photos (such as they are) showing a side view (occlusal surface toward the top) and an occlusal view (anterior side presumably? toward the top): Cheers. -Ken

I've been making progress in the bucket of micro-matrix that gathered from a spot on the Peace River back in May when I made my last sojourn to sift there this season. Looking through my 10x photographer's loupe with one eye while scanning the matrix was giving me a bad case of double vision if I gave into temptation and picked through more than a Solo cup full of micro-matrix. In attempt to find a technique easier on the eyes I purchased a 5MP digital microscope (basically a USB webcam with an adjustable magnifying lens). I found this too slow and cumbersome to use in my search for micro fossils but it does seem to be reasonably proficient in taking acceptable quality images of the finds. I was struck with a brilliant thought yesterday (and I'm afraid I've probably now used up my quota of these for 2014). Being an old gray-haired codger now my eyes seem resistant to focusing on anything close-up. It's not that my eyes are too bad to read restaurant menus but my arms seem to be too short. I do wear contact lenses to help me with my distance vision (and have for decades). I know that without my contacts in place that my close-up vision is actually pretty good after all. The epiphany yesterday was to simply tuck my contact lenses safely in their case and then use no magnifying optics at all to scan for micro fossils in my matrix. It turns out that with the aid of a good LED light that I can clearly spot and identify micros less than half a millimeter with the naked eye. This has greatly speeded-up the search through my micro-matrix and done away with the eye strain and double vision I was experiencing when searching under magnification. This evening while relaxing with a fine sipping rum I searched my way through a plastic Solo cup full of micro-matrix. In addition to the usual very tiny shark teeth and ray plates I came across something novel (and I love novelty). It appears that this micro fossil might be a curved incisor of something mouse-like in size (and construction). Though it is difficult to show in photographs, one end (root) shows a bit of a hollow concavity and the other seems to show a beveled (occlusal) surface. I tried to include a scale in the images but the shiny surface reflected the circle of LED lights in a very distracting way. The actual length of this incisor is about 9mm if that helps to narrow down who could have formerly owned this bit of dentition. I'm assuming something mouse-like but would be curious to hear if any on the Forum have any more detailed opinions. Two sides: Cheers. -Ken

EOS = end of season. I always push the envelope, going out after the gauges indicate possible stupidity. Last Friday, I switched to my high water locations and pulled out a nice mouth plate for my digging. The current was a little fast and I was digging in water just above my waist. But today, in the same spot the current was fast and the water was up to my chin. No chance. I then tried a number of different locations, all with the same result. The only excitement was trying to get back into my kayak from 5 feet of water. I guess it is time to categorize, sort, display my recent finds and do maintenance on my gear, especially the sieves. and go into fossil withdrawal...

I'd appreciate opinions/confirmation on a tooth I picked up June 3rd from the Peace. The tooth I'm holding in the top photo is the subject tooth. The left tooth in this following photo is a previous find (broken) identified by Richard Hulbert as a cat (Jaguar/Lion??) lower molar or 1st pre-molar. The tooth on the right is the new tooth, with 1 of 2 roots intact. The deep grooves impress me as a cat tooth, but pre-molars always confuse me. Thanks for the help.

Been having fun picking through my small cache of collected micro-matrix. So far I've found mostly tiny versions of the larger teeth I usually find and some pharyngeal "button" teeth from drums and other fishes. Been looking for the elusive cookie cutter shark tooth but haven't come across one yet. Turned up this in my searching today and I'm thinking this which looks a bit different from the normal micro fossils I've uncovered. I'm assuming it is likely some sort of ray tooth but I'm just learning about these little guys that usually fall through my sifting screen. The scale is in millimeters so it's a little one. Cheers. -Ken

Pam and I went on a Peace River kayak trip Friday 5/31 guided by Mark Renz. We had a great time on the river and talking with Mark, who is very knowledgeable about the river, fossils and the history of the area. The weather turned out great even though we had to postpone the trip a couple days due to thunder storms in the area. We found some great fossils and lots of teeth (another post, another day, I'm a couple years behind in shooting pictures). No alligators, I'm sorry to say, I was hopping for some close up pix but not too close up. All in all it was well worth the trip and a lot of fun and we would recommend a trip with Mark anytime. Thanks, Mark.

Found this new Zolfo, looks to be peccary or sus? looking for confirmation.

Shrek and I took my mother out fossil hunting for Mother's Day. She is 71, and suffered a stroke about 8 years ago. The stroke stole her balance, some of her eyesight (she has partial veils), and her short term memory. It didn't, however, rob her zeal for life nor her penchant for adventure. Although from Englland, accent and all; she has now been a "Florida Girl" for the majority of her life. She is still in awe of how beautiful south Florida is. About a quarter mile from our kayak launch, our rusted out kayak trailer tongue broke. Shrek had to put my kayak on top of our 4 Runner, then balance his kayak and the trailer by weighing down the back. It was a dubious start to the day, but we were not deterred. We didn't even give up when I realized I forgot the mayo for the sandwiches! So, after a frightful start, we got our best find ever! One of the many times (sometimes for furtive reasons😇) I'm greatful for my mother's short term memory loss. Every time she saw it, she'd forgotten it, so it was like finding it over and over again. We got some good hemi's, some perfect sand shark, some other smaller megs, but the meg stole the show! Our son saved the day by bringing us my father's flatbed trailer and leaving it at the launch so we could get home.

My wife Tammy and I made it out for one last trip to the Peace River for this season. I expect I'll be busy and won't have a chance to get back to the river before the summer rains usher in another rainy season with raging river levels depositing a new layer of gravel (and erasing any of the pot holes and spoil piles that us fossil hunters have worked so hard at this season--like shaking a giant Etch a Sketch). We experimented with a 1/2" mesh retrofit on one of our sifting screens since John (Sasha) and Jeff (jcbshark) have used them to great end. The spot we focused on in the Peace River was an area of large chunky gravel with bowling ball size boulders of matrix mixed in. This gravel bed has never turned up much in the way of smaller finds or tiny shark teeth so we figured we'd not be missing much with the wider screen mesh. As Jeff had commented on, you sure can shovel a lot of material through the wider mesh before filling a screen. I went from an average of 3 shovels full per screen (with the 1/4" mesh) to 6-10 shovels with the more coarse mesh. As there is a lot less tiny gravel to sort through in the sifter it takes very little time to parse through what the screen has kept from passing through. It was definitely a quick way to zip through a large amount of gravel. The very first screen produced a nice Equus lower molar which was a nice way to start the day. Though this site has produced some interesting finds in the past (a couple of 3 lb. mammoth tooth chunks, large makos, glyptodont rosettes, and even a gold wedding ring and tie tack--there must be a story there) this trip didn't produce much in the way of "wow" moments. The water was over 2' lower than when we tried this site just two weeks ago so it was much easier to dig and even visually locate the chunky gravel areas. Since I'd found large chunks of mammoth tooth there in the past it seemed necessary to reach down and inspect every large chunk that wouldn't balance on the shovel on its way to the sifter. Sadly we only had large chunks of matrix and no heart-stopping moment when a large, intact mammoth tooth reveals itself from the tannic waters--maybe next season. Though we hunted alone this weekend without the company of any of the South Florida TFF members, we did have a companion of sorts. While standing in waist deep water about 20' from the shore where our canoe was parked I looked out while chucking larger pieces of matrix away from our digging area. Just after a shoebox size chunk of rock had left my hands I noticed it was heading in the vicinity of a young gator which had come to the surface for air (and likely to see what all the commotion was about). Though the rock created a great depth charge of a splash not 3 feet from the gator's head it didn't spook but simply slowly descended back into the tea colored water. Had this been a 13' adult I'd have given it as wide a berth as possible as I cautiously slinked back to my canoe but as this was a juvenile probably less than 4' I chose to keep my eye on him (or her?) while we continued to dig and sift. We continued to volley shots in the general direction in an effort to make our nearby surroundings a less appealing for this living fossil. Undaunted, Al (as we took to calling him) stayed with us for several hours periodically surfacing near the shore for a breath of air and to keep an eye on his unruly new neighbors. Luckily, the only gator tooth I encountered was a black one that surfaced in my sifting screen. We've seen gators occasionally on the Peace but this is the only time we've been within 10' of one while in the water. We dug through a lot of the coarse gravel but it didn't deliver much other than dugong rib bones. They are exceedingly common at this site with every shovel full of material bringing up 2-3 fragments. I wondered if it was possible to dig a shovel full of gravel and not turn up at least one dugong frag and I think the only time I did was when I ventured off the gravel deposit into more sandy areas. We found a few whale (dolphin) ear bones (tympanic bullas) though most were pretty beat-up and fragmented. I had to laugh when I got 3 of these in a single screen of gravel--we ended up with 9 in total. There was a lot of small fragments of mammoth and mastodon (or gomphothere) teeth and even few small pieces of tusk ivory that ended up in our sifting screen but the largest piece of what might be proboscidean was a large rib? fragment. It's a bit big and not the right shape for dugong and besides it has a decidedly apparent marrow space. We had a nicely complete fish (shark?) vert that was just a little too big to fall through the sifting screen and so came home with us. The other vert we found was not fossilized but recent and I assumed might be gator (though I have to look through other possibilities like deer or pig as well). We were hoping for some nice glyptodont rosettes but they eluded us this time. Instead we had several armor plates from Holmesina (mostly broken pieces but one complete and in nice shape). In addition to many frags we ended up with three nice horse lower molars including the smallest one we've ever found (just over 1/2" across). I'll have to consult some books to see if this is just a juvenile Equus or a smaller species (I suspect the former). A couple of bison molar frags rounded out the mammal teeth for the trip. Turtle shell was relatively absent this time with only a few nuchal plates from the carapace and another "peace sign" gular-humeral plate from the plastron. The nearly 2" long leg spur (osteoderm) from a large land tortoise was the trip maker for me (I'm oddly quite fond of these things). Though we had dozens of meg frags (mostly nearly unidentifiable root fragments) we did find a real shamer--what would have been about a 3.5" meg split right down the center. Rather than caulk it to a hand mirror to make it "complete" this one will end up in my next goodie bag to be gifted to some unsuspecting friend's kid. The only complete meg we found was a little 2" one that oddly didn't come from the site with coarse gravel but from an area with finer gravel. After our allotted time searching for big finds at the coarse gravel site we continued down river to an area that I know has a great abundance of fine (pea-size) gravel. in the past we've found areas of this gravel bed where 3 shovels into a sifter have revealed up to 2 dozen smaller shark teeth--great fun when you have a group of friends with kids. We had a competition to see who could get the most teeth in a screen and I think the winner was something like 25 or 26. I wanted to stop at this location (coded FINE) in my handheld GPS because I figured this would be a good place to harvest some micro matrix. After seeing all of the fun that various TFF members have had picking though the fine gravel that Jeff (jcbshark) and John (Sasha) had collected I though it might be interesting to cache some of this material to play with during the off season (when the river it too high to hunt). I brought along one of my 1/4" sifters and had a piece of window screen material (roughly 1/16" openings) to set inside my new 1/2" mesh sifting screen. By double stacking the two screens I could sort out some micro matrix. The 1/4" mesh on top kept out any larger gravel while the 1/16" mesh fitted into the bottom sifter let the sand and tiny gravel pass through. This left micro matrix with a grain size roughly 1/16" to 1/4" in diameter sitting in the lower sifter. My wife took a turn with the shovel loading up the stacked screens and she hunted for any tiny teeth trapped by the upper sifter while I worked the finer gravel in the bottom screen till the sand had made it through the fine mesh. I brought along a 5 gallon bucket to dump the micro matrix into and soon had the bucket nearly filled. You can imagine that this bucket ended up rather heavy and I got the brainy idea to put the sifting screen on top of the bucket and invert it on the sandy shore so the trapped water could drain away reducing what weight I could. After it had drained well I flipped the bucket upright and scooped back into the bucket the gravel that had spilled out into the sifter. While doing this the bucket regained most of its weight and unfortunately the sandy sloped shoreline where I was working gave way as the titled bucket approached full fill tipping a good portion of its contents back into the water at the edge of the shore. After some choice words I re-scooped a combination of micro matrix, sand, and water back into the bucket and loaded it into the canoe. I'd deal with cleaning-up the matrix at home. The matrix is now spread out on a plastic tarp sunning in my driveway. Once it is quite dry I figure it will sift more easily. I'll give it another pass or to over some more window screen mesh and then store it in a dry place to play with later. I'll be bringing some samples of this mesh to Chicago next week when I head up there to do a little more fossil hunting north of the Mason-Dixon line. Though I didn't collect as much micro matrix as I had intended (next time remember to take more buckets) I may make some more care packs of Peace River micro matrix available on the Forum if there is still interest. Cheers. -Ken

A beautiful Friday on the Peace River yielded a baby mammoth tooth! The photo is the top chewing surface, still sandy from the river. I also found my best river meg to date, 2" on the diagonal, and 2 tapir caps which, as a newbie fossiler, exactly doubles my collection of tapir caps. Thanks to the guidance of Shellseeker and another esteemed fossil friend who granted guidance and access to a more remote location.

Caleb and I decided to go back to the same part of the river we were in last Friday to try to find a nice big pristine meg this time. Nice hot day and we didn't do too badly. Worn megs and fragments were there in abundance, and I did get a couple pretty decent ones. Much more species variety this time as well. This chunk I've posted in the ID Request section. Hoping it's a recognizable elephant joint bone or something even cooler! That's probably it for me for the next couple weeks.

Beautiful day today so FF member Scrambler (Caleb) and I got out after a couple weeks off and decided to try for some megs again. We each dug in one hole for about 5 hours and came away with allot of fragments and megs in fair to midling shape. Here is Caleb in his standard position which looks completely anti-ergonomic but he can keep it up for hours; These are my finds for the day. Note that from this site I've found not a single mammal fossil. The 2 megs in the middle are in pretty decent shape. I wanted some input on these items which we have always called silicified oysters, but they really don't look like true oysters. Here are 2 views: These are fairly common in sections of the river that have allot of limestone and look like silica replaced glove fingertips (if the tips were very thick). Anyone have a good idea whether they are oysters or not? Saw several other members on the river today. Hard to stay away when it's this nice and the water is low!