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I've spent a fair amount of time now combing the beaches around Lyme Regis and Charmouth in Dorset, England, and thought i would put together a topic that presents all of my marine reptile bone finds (so far) in one place. The fossils here are Early Jurassic in age, approx. 195-190 million years old and come predominantly from the Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone formations. I first visited this area in 2013 with the simple goal of finding at least one ichthyosaur vertebra, and now after three subsequent trips in 2014, 2017 and 2019, i've put together a far better assortment of finds than i could have possibly hoped for! I think i have been quite lucky along this coastline, although it has taken many hours to amass this collection. Across all four of my England trips i have spent a total of 18 days looking for bones in the Lyme Regis area, most often on the stretch of beach between Lyme Regis and Charmouth but sometimes at Monmouth Beach as well. This coastline also produces a large quantity and diversity of ammonites, belemnites, crinoids, bivalves, brachiopods, gastropods, and even rare insects. However i've always been most interested in fossil vertebrates, and so the ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs that are found here have been my primary target for collecting. There are also some impressive articulated fish to be found, but as yet i have had no luck in finding any! Ichthyosaur bones are the most common type of vertebrate fossil in the area, particularly their bi-concave vertebrae. Less commonly you can also find pieces of the jaw, sometimes with teeth. If you are extra lucky though you may also find plesiosaur bones, which for whatever reason are much rarer than those of ichthyosaurs. The best way to find any type of marine reptile bone around Lyme Regis is to closely examine the shingle on the beach, and i've spent seemingly countless hours bent over and slowly walking along the shore looking for them. If you have a bad back it's even more difficult! I've learnt that bones can be found pretty much anywhere on the beach: in the slumping clays, at the top of the beach in the 'high and dry' shingle, along the middle of the beach, at the low tide line, and also underwater amongst the rocky pools and ledges. And just when i start to think that the beach has already been heavily searched and there isn't much left to find, there always seems to be another bone that turns up, often lying in plain sight. The truth is that most people who visit here to collect are not experts and will probably walk past a lot of these bones, as the texture is the most important thing that gives them away and learning to recognise it takes a bit of time. For the sorts of articulated skeletons that sometimes make news headlines and are beautifully intact, searching the shingle is not the way to go, but for a short term visitor like me i think it is the best way of maximising the chances of finding any sort of reptile bone in the shortest amount of time (and something i can take back with me on the plane too!). Without further ado, here are the pics (spread across multiple posts due to file size limits). I've also included as-found pictures for some of these finds to provide a sense of what they look like and how they are found when they are on the beach. The collection so far. Starting first with my favourite Lyme Regis fossil, this is a very nice plesiosaur vertebra that is in great condition! A very rare find! I have been very fortunate to find two plesiosaur vertebrae at Lyme Regis so far, although this one is smaller and more beach-worn than the previous example. Continued below.

Hi everyone I came across these teeth on our favorite site. It's listed as plesiosaur and ichthyosaur, but could the plesiosaur be a pliosaur tooth? The ridges are quite pronounced.. The teeth in this set were both found in the Seversk Sandstone in Belgorod, Kursk, Russia

Hi, I am interested in this tooth---sold as Plesiosaur tooth from the Kem Kem Beds. First time I've seen one from Kem Kem sold before, but I see someone bought one recently in the "mailbox score" thread, but it looks different--lighter colored preservation. Anyone know if this is actually from Kem Kem going by the matrix and preservation and not from Ouled Abdoun with just the wrong formation listed? It is 5CM long. Also the tip---just repaired, or compositied? I'm a bit concerned that the top of the tip seems a little bit wider than the middle. But it could just be a bodged repair. Thanks

Hi everyone, I got offered this pair of marine reptile teeth as those of ichthyosaurs, but am having a hard time making my mind up about their identification. I'd therefore like to ask for your opinions. The teeth were found during works around Nancy back in 2004, and, based on other ichthyosaur finds from the region, likely dates the Toarcian stage of the Early Jurassic (though, from what I can tell, Oxfordian marine deposits are also accessible in the area). This makes them roughly the same age as material from the Posidonia Shale/Holzmaden and Whitby, but slightly younger than that of the Lyme Bay area. The above photograph is the only one I have, with the seller being on fieldwork and unable to provide much further information for the next couple of weeks. Although we can safely eliminate marine crocodile as contenders for the original owners of these teeth, and I think they are too big to have belonged to fish, I'm undecided on whether these are just highly worn ichthyosaur teeth or plesiosaur teeth. There's something to be said for both. The tall, slender shape of the teeth and their slight curvature, for instance, would seem to fit plesiosaurian teeth, as would, most significantly, the round root of the bigger tooth. In that case, however, the smaller tooth does seem a bit stubby, and the traces of ornamentation along the midsection of the larger tooth surprisingly equidistantly spaced. Generally, the morphology of the smaller tooth to me suggests ichthyosaur rather than plesiosaur. But if that were the case, I'd expect either enamel folds on the crowns themselves, folds on the root, or both (even when ichthyosaur teeth have smooth enamel, I find they still have folds on their roots). I'd also expect the root to be more polygonal in shape, somewhere in the range of triangular to (rounded) square. This is not the case. Now there seems to be some ornamentation midway up the larger specimen which equidistant spacing correlates well with patterns of the folds found on ichthyosaur teeth, thus may indicate the tooth is ophthalmosaurid and therefore Oxfordian rather than Torcian in age. The below image I drew up makes the comparison: As you can see, the match is less then ideal, as the top part of the French tooth is completely devoid of enamel folds, whereas in an ophthalmosaurid tooth the plicidentine folds actually taper out until the enamel is clear. @belemniten, however, posted images of a couple of his ichthyosaur teeth from Holzmaden, one of which appears to show a similar pattern as visible in the middle of the French tooth under consideration here, including what appears to be a round root: However, when looking at other images of the same tooth, it turns out that the root does have folds, as you'd expect from ichthyosaur teeth: Similarly, the below tooth seems to have a superficially similar appearance to the French tooth for the hairline cracking of the enamel, and the fact that enamel appears to be missing from the crown immediately above the root proper (which, again, exhibits folds, however). Still, if the "smooth round root" on the French tooth would've been covered by enamel as well, this would make for a very tall tooth as far as ichthyosaurs go. As illustrated by the specimen below (source), though, ichthyosaur teeth do occasionally have round roots: Moreover, the folds on the root don't always run the full height of it (image source): Lastly, as the specimen below demonstrates (source), the entire root can look completely smooth, presumably from wear: As such, I'm wondering whether the French tooth specimen might not be a very worn ichthyosaur tooth, with its parts being composed as such: This doesn't particularly make too much sense to me either, as the part of the root with folds is rather long and has a very abrupt transition into the remainder of the root. In addition, it raises the question of how the tooth would've gotten so worn. Though I understand there are fluvially exposed sites around Nancy, could this have caused the wear we're seeing. Or would the wear rather be peridepositional? So, I guess I can summarize my questions as: Do these look like plesiosaur or ichthyosaur teeth? If plesiosaurian, what would the equidistant striations on the midsection of the tooth be? If ichthyosaurian, do these teeth look more ophthalmosaurid or pre-ophthalmosaur? How might the wear I think I'm seeing be explained? Thanks for the help! cc @paulgdls @PointyKnight @DE&i @Welsh Wizard @RuMert @FF7_Yuffie

Hi everyone! I could really use some help identifying this one. I found it at Post Oak Creek. I included a bunch of pictures that I labeled so you all can know what I'm talking about. The microscope shots have a red scale bar that is 1 mm. Here's what I know it's Cretaceous 94-90 million years old from the Eagle Ford Group. the bone surface is mostly weathered but still in it's original shape. except for some major weathering on the back of the left side. It came from a large vertebrate. The bottom is flat, the back is concave, it slopes forward to a blunt point in the front, It appears to be mostly symmetrical with the line of symmetry going front to back. It looks like a distal phalange (finger tip bone) to me, but neither Mosasaurs or Plesiosaurs have a bone that looks like that to my knowledge. It honestly looks like the distal phalange of a terrestrial vertebrate to me, but, well, yeah I need another perspective before I go that route. Hey I can dream right?

Another unknown piece, but at least with some information on its locale - Lavernock, Wales, UK. I believe it to be either Ichthyosaur or Plesiosaur but I'm afraid I don't currently have an idea what it is. I'd appreciate any input. Thank you, John

Hi all, I've had the below piece in my collection for a number of years now, having acquired it thinking it was a juvenile plesiosaur propodial. It comes from the Oxford Clay of Peterborough and is of Callovian Jurassic age. However, when recently doing some research towards answering another question on TFF, I realised that - even though there's some plastic deformation going on - it doesn't quite look like the juvenile plesiosaur propodial I have from the rhaetic at Aust, nor does it look like a plesiosaur propodial in a more general sense (see both post and images below). There are some oddities that have started to make me wonder, in not a plesiosaur propodial, what else it may be in that case. The bone is quite dense, so is definitely marine reptile. And, since I'm quite sure it's not ichthyosaurian, this, I believe, leaves only pl(es)iosaur and teleosaur. Morphologically, the bone consists of a shaft that widens towards one end, with the other end having broken off. The widened end, top-side, forms a bit of an overhang across what appears to be an intact articulation surface, with a notch cutting into it from the right. At the broken end, also on the right, there appears to be a slight twist in the bone. This is, moreover, the side that's rounded along the length of the bone, whereas the other side appears carinated. Although there's some crushing on the underside of the bone, that surface appears markedly more flat than the obverse. It is primarily the facts that one of the edges is (more) angular and that the bone thickens towards the widening end - rather than thins out, as in a typical plesiosaur propodial - that make me feel this is not a plesiosaur (sensu lato) propodial. Unfortunately, I don't have enough qualitative reference material on teleosaurs myself (some images below) to evaluate whether they could be a candidate for the bone - such as long or girdle bones - and didn't find anything matching amongst the figures in Johnson, Young, Steel and Lepage (2015) or Young, Sachs & Abel (2018) either. So I'm left thinking may be it could be a plesiosaur ilium, as in the other post referenced above. There are definitely some features that seem to argue in its favour, such as the flat back, slight twist and widening distal end. But lacking the proximal end of the bone makes it harder to judge, and the thickening of the bone towards the widened part seems to conflict with the idea of the bone being an ilium. Still, there are very few flat narrow bones in a plesiosaur outside of its extremities... Machimosaurus sp. at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels (source: Wikipedia) Thoracic region of Machimosaurus sp. at Paléospace l'Odyssée at Villers-sur-Mer Metriorhynchus superciliosus at the Paläontologische Summlung MUT Tübingen Thoracic region of Steneosaurus sp. at the Fossilienmuseum Dotternhausen Steneosaurus spp. specimens at Urweltmuseum Hauff in Holzmaden Steneosaurus sp. leg bones at the Paläontologische Sammlung MUT Tübingen

I bought this from very trusted sellers. And its pourus or if thats how you spell it. A little piece of it came off. Can i glue it with cyanorylate? (The fossil is from khouribga)this is where the piece came off

NJ Cretaceous stream find. Looks like a tooth of some kind, the pics don't effectively show how tapered and curved it is. Any thoughts if it is a tooth and if so, what from?

Hi I found this on the coast of Whitby.. the circle at the top stud out and something different to the slate. After a bit of chipping the main bit came away easily and is definitely separate to the slate?? Any help would be greatly appreciated..