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I am on the Texas Coast for the second time this year!! My husband and I stayed in the Tarpon Inn in Port Aransas for New Years, just for a couple of days and now, this week, my parents rented a house in Port A so I am here for the Second time in 2022....more beach time in the last two weeks than the last two years!! I love the Texas Coast in the winter. Right now it is 74 degrees and I'm hanging out under the tiki cabana writing this. Tomorrow will be cool and possibly rainy, so I am getting my fossil (and shell) hunting in today. So, as for the fossils. They may not seem like much, but I am SUPER excited because they are not only my first beach fossil finds, but also my first Pleistocene finds! (Aside from a vole molar I found in some Post Oak Creek matrix, but that wasn't really IN the field). On New Years Day I was beachcombing hoping to find shark teeth, but found this instead, which actually is even better, in my opinion! A small bit of turtle shell!! 1 inch My first find of the year! So now today, now that I know that fossils can be found here....I'm looking HARD for them! Not finding anything washed up, I scooped up a bucket of shell hash and looked through it when I got back to the "cabana" and was happy to find a little albeit broken vertebra. Yay!! It's not much, but it's at least something! And just because these are awesome, a picture of the crab claws I found. Not fossils, sadly! Big one is the size of my thumb! So I shall continue my beach fossil hunting and hopefully have some more to add in a few days!

I found this turtle in Hell Creek formation outside Glendive MT last summer, well below KT junction (image 2670). I can't find textbooks or images similar. 43 cm x21 cm (2677). Carapace relatively good markings (image 3127) though lots of cracks. What I can't find is a group of turtles having a carapace without the pygal/supracaudal scutes ( image 3126- i.e. it's indented, definitely not fractured. It is quite fragmented and I'd love to find an anatomy book to aid in gluing it back together right.

Hi all, two IDs here. Both are from North Carolina’s Cretaceous Black Creek group. The first is a small piece of turtle carapace. My question is, does this piece of turtle shell also preserve the keratinous plate that layers over top of a turtle’s carapace? I’ve never seen one fossilized before. The second specimen is a bone fragment. My only question with it is what could have bones with this much cancellous/trabecular bone? I haven’t collected something this porous before, it’s new to me. I’m thinking reptile, maybe croc or turtle? Not hoping for any ID beyond that with this fragment. Any help is appreciated, and thanks! turtle shell: bone fragment:

So I found this bone in the Cretaceous Bladen formation of eastern North Carolina. It’s 2cm in length. After looking at pictures of the skeletons of various organism, I think it is either the carpal or metacarpal of a turtle or a mosasaur. Does this look accurate for this bone? Thanks!

So, I found these 5 bones, and firstly, I need to know if they are cetacean or not. If not cetacean, then they are likely crocodilian, mosasaur, or I guess possibly turtle. They come from North Carolina, either from marine Cretaceous Black Creek group deposits, or there is a chance they could be marine Pliocene (hence why I would like to either confirm or rule out cetacean if possible). The area they come from is mostly Cretaceous, but I have found a few Pliocene shark teeth there, and stratigraphic maps show nearby Pliocene stratum, so I’m not totally sure (the area is in Cretaceous stratum on the map, but Pliocene is close by). These bones have distinct shapes so I think they may be IDable...but on my own I’m lost. Thank you for any help you can provide!!!!! Bone 1 (pretty sure it’s a rib): Bone 2: Bone 3: Bone 4 (I think this one is a rib too): Bone 5:

I just recently found this bone in the Cretaceous Black Creek group deposits of eastern North Carolina. I think it is either crocodile or turtle. I am almost positive it isn’t mosasaur, dinosaur, or plesiosaur (some other tetrapods found in the Black Creek group). Also, is it a radius, ulna, tibia, fibula, femur, etc.? Or is it even a limb bone? I have no idea. Thanks!

I've been finding what I believe are eggs of prehistoric animals mainly turtles or tortoises. I've been told they are rocks so I decided to sand one down and discovered what looks to be a turtle inside. I'm I have not been able to find others with turtles inside but realize they didn't hatch for a reason either they weren't fertilized or they were or died before they were hatched. Alsoi am currently homeless and do not have a lot of resources at my disposal (besides time) or the knowledge of what I'm doing. The larger egg has a brown leathery patch covering approx a quarter of the egg.

I found this here in Las Vegas, it looks to be a turtle head. I'm using a Chromebook for the pictures and unfortunately I don't have any other options to take pictures right now but there is faint yellow line surrounding the gums going around the eye. the same yellowish color appears around a kidney shape near the back of the head and seems to be in the same area the otic chamber is on turtles. on one side of the head it appears to have teeth marks which I have found on other "turtle" pieces in this same area. I've also found what appear to be turtle or reptilian eggs. on one I sanded the "egg shell " off and you can see what appears to be a baby turtle inside and it looks like it was smashed probably right before it hatched . I will try to post these also sometime today. I'm not a paleontologist Anthropologist or geologist but I really believe with DNA testing there's something here if you can't already see it in the pictures.

i have been compiling an osteological analysis of this turtle skull unfortunately despite research i have no idea what species it is. due to poor cataloging when first discovered all that is known about the fossil is that it was found in Oued Zem morocco.

I was wondering if anyone could help with some NSR IDs? I also have one item that looks like a tooth from POC. It is Item 1. All other items are from the North Sulphur River. Item 1. Possible tooth? Item 2. Calcium nondual? Item 3. Pleistocene turtle? It is extremely thick and hard. Item 4. Some have speculated it as turtle plastron bone or Plesiosaurus paddle bone. Item 5. Some type of Geological crystal nondual? Item 6. Coprolite or just rock? Item 7.

Hi all My son and I were going through our unsorted fossils, and we came upon two vertebrae from the North Sulphur River in Texas that appear similar in shape though differ in size. Both have one vertebral face that is convex while the opposite side is concave. I've read that this type of ball-and-socket joint can be found in both turtles and mosasaurs. What do you all think? Any help is greatly appreciated. Bret

I found this in a box labeled fossils at my grandfathers house with a bunch of other fossils. He lived in California but he traveled all over the world. I’m not sure where he got this.

I found this in the Judith River formation last weekend near the Milk River, I assumed it was just croc scute but it is thicker and different texture, maybe its turtle or a different kind of croc. @patrickhudson thinks its dinosaur skin but I doubted him.

This piece looks like a shell plate of a turtle. It is from Yunnan, China. Is it a A shell plate of turtle?

I feel like the larger is a cetacean, turtle, or *possibly* mosasaur? The little one I really have no clue.

Last month my boyfriend and I went on our first ever trip to the Isle of Wight. We stayed for four full days and managed to squeeze in a fossil trip each day. On the first day we met up with one of my friends who was staying on the island with her boyfriend who is an 'islander'. We decided to visit the popular Compton Bay, an interesting and well known cretaceous site famous for dinosaur remains. When we arrived the tide was quite high and I didn't realise just how long it takes to go down (several hours, for future reference), but we were able to get onto the beach and walk a somewhat narrow strip of sand. After less than 10 minutes I picked up the first fossil! To me it looks like bone, but it has been loosely suggested to me it might be plant. It has a lot of iron rich matrix still attached to it which has unfortunately stained all my other fossils from this location as I desalinated them all in the same container (I would be glad to hear any advice for removing this staining?). Not 10 minutes after that I made the next find of the day, a small chunk of rolled bone. The tide was still very high so we decided to wander about the island and came back later that evening. Our lunch spot. The tide was lower in the evening and we had a wonderful time pointing out the dinosaur footprints, the trackway and finding pebbles full of shells, a pebbly full of bony fish bits and one more bit of bone for me and finally one for my friend as well (don't have pic of that though). Not sure how well the photos demonstrate this, but I think this may be a broken bit of a caudal vertebra. On day two we tried, and failed to get to Rocken End for some lovely ammonites. We couldn't find the right spot, so planned to try again the next day. In the afternoon we went to Bouldnor in search of some Oligocene turtles, crocodiles, mammals and whatever else we might find. However we were unlucky again and only found four chunks of Emys turtle shell. I am pleased with them though, as three of the four are really rather nice. It was a muddy but pleasant evening. Once again we had to wait a while (though 30 mins or so) for the tide to retreat. The first two pieces on the left were found within about 1m of each other. I'm not sure what to make of the 'stripe' on the top side of the third chunk. The next morning we found the correct access point and made our way to Rocken End, it's a fairly long walk down a steep hill(/mountain??) but wasn't as bad as it looked from the car park, there are steps carved into the mud at regular points. Soon enough we were scrambling over boulders of cretaceous upper greensand and pointing out ammonites that were poking out. Extracting the ammonites proved a significant challenge. They are incredibly delicate and soft. You could reach up and snap the ends out the rock very easily and practically all of the ammonites we attempted to extract came out in pieces, or broke irreperably. I did find two lovely little shark teeth sticking out, I believe these are somewhat uncommon here so I feel lucky. Just as we were leaving, my boyfriend found three ammonites practically lying on the ground in front him. They were by far the best ammonites we collected, he was very pleased with himself considering I had spent the previous two hours chiselling away whilst he sat and read his book... Prep in progress from the other side. The third one as found, just peeking out... ... and after some prep, it's still in the big block though, will (try to) cut a little pedestal out of the rock. Unfortunately the centre is missing. I also found a few beautiful brachiopods, bivalves and worm tubes - and also an echinoid! I have yet to ID any of these, but I think I actually prefer them over the ammonites, I wish I collected a few more.

This is from an email exchange between Dr. Elizabeth T. Smith (of Lightning Ridge and author of the singular "Black Opal Fossils of Lightning Ridge") and I, last month. [Liz also co-authored "Ornithopod diversity in the Griman Creek Formation (Cenomanian), New South Wales, Australia" which was first published in Peer J magazine and which established the new species of herbivore, Weewarasaurus pobeni.] "To explain, it's 0345 and I have insomnia intensified by my excitement about an opalised Lungfish plate I bought today from a top bloke mining at Emu Field (Coocoran), and a little bone I found while going through several hundred pieces of a Ridge miner's selections over the last 4 days. I know it was unfair of me, Liz, to send you that photograph and ask you to guess where/what the piece was from one photograph, not having the advantage that I did of the dish in front of me, pieces wet, under a light. [Digression: before you read on, have a look at the rocks in the dish below and see if you can spot the 'treasure'] : I have sent the same photo again (above) and I'll guess you have a grasp of some Cartesian Geometry so I want you to imagine that the dish has a horizontal X-axis and a vertical Y-axis through the middle which becomes the Origin, the point (0,0). Let's say each axis is 20 units long (which is pretty close to its actual length of 22cms). . The piece in question is approximately at the Point (1,3). What caught my eye was the nearly circular concavity, which irl is about 6mm in diameter. As you know, bones (neck, tail, if turtle) often have those concavities which made that piece stand out in the dish as my eyes roamed at first glance over the contents. The second photo, cropped, is a close-up using the rock at 6 oclock (at the bottom) as (0,0). As I said, I had been going through the material for nearly 4 days, about 20 hours all up, and I was close to the end of the lowest grade of potch and colour (well, potch and potch, really, ha! ) in the bottom of the container he gave me as part of a deal that we did, oh, I don't know, maybe 4 or 5 years ago. I had been through the rest of it not long after I got it, but I went through it all again this week, including the lowest grade (but the latter for the first time). It's not a big-money or spectacular piece with any colour through it. In fact it's rather dull (grey), unassuming, and could easily be mistaken for just another piece of Grey potch in host Rock. A small bone of inconspicuous presence, it does not shout "OH WOW!!" like the little croc tooth on the cover of your wonderful book. If it was one of Portia's caskets from "The Merchant of Venice", it would be the lead one. However, I am typically/predictably enchanted by it, as plain as it is. In your own language, one of the transverse processes on one side of the neural arch has been worn away, either in the process of deposition, or washing in the agi. It's a bone with only one wing, so to speak. But you'll see more of that in the next email when I send you some more photographs. Until I found it, I was going to text the miner and congratulate him on not missing anything. The more unusual or really interesting pieces he takes out --- he has a great eye for detail and for the unusual --- and puts those in separate small bags and has often identified small bones himself, for example a lovely small grey croc scapula (July 2017) and another small bone which I think is turtle and has a little colour in it. The miner is quiet, unassuming, never skites about anything he finds and through our common fascination with opalised fossils, we have become opalised-fossil mates. The sheer volume of non-commercial opalised pieces that he has found and kept only because he finds them so interesting is staggering. Some of the pieces are so tiny I am surprised that he even sees them. I believe he worked two claims at Allawah which were smack on top of an ancient Cretaceous billabong or maybe a creek or similar. The hundreds of pieces that he has kept contain just about anything and everything opalised that you can imagine, or have seen, and plenty of stuff I've never seen before! To my knowledge I don't think there have been any fish vertebrae, but many gastroliths ("yabby buttons"), opalised pine cones, many hundreds of pieces of opalised wood some of which are very pretty or have great shape/contours/lines. Gastropods and other shells, too. Also turtle remains (a few pieces of shell and bones), croc too, and I think at least one Dino bone (not sure). There's also pieces that look like coprolite; worm tubes as well. I can't wait for you to see the whole collection and although I have spent many hours rebagging and measuring and weighing and adding notes/descriptions there will be many more hours spent on it. I can foresee somebody doing valuable research or even a thesis on his collection alone. The wealth of opalised geological, flora and fauna pieces from one small area is jaw-dropping. Most miners would have thrown a lot of it away. His collection is also an excellent summary of the story of opal mining. A lot of hard work over many hours for not much reward and even when there's a huge volume of opalised material only a small percentage of it contains colour, or commercially valuable stones. My guess is that this latest piece --- one tiny bone in many hundreds of pieces, about 5kgs of rough --- is turtle but it has one really unusual feature that I've never seen before but I'll save that for your call after the next email. I may not finish it this morning. It's now 0435 and I'm starting to fade a little bit. All the best, M. P.S. In this 3rd photo where I am holding the piece, a very small fragment has been broken off (middle top left) but is held in place by host rock. Very unusual. Hi Liz I'm sending you some more photos now. One end has a round, smooth and convex protrusion. The other end has that lovely little concavity. Both are about 6 mm across. I'm guessing that the rounded concavity is the rear of the Piece in which the rounded convex protrusion of another piece would fit and move smoothly. Is that right? Separated by cartilage when alive? One of the little "wings" (transverse processes) on the left side is missing, probably broken off by mining or when being washed in the agi. No colour, but otherwise the preservation is very good thanks to the host rock I suspect, as you noted. In that same photo you can see that I started to clean off some of the host rock on the bottom right hand side but I stopped when I realised that some of the host rock also contains other little bits of detritus or whatever that might have scientific interest, so I'm not going to clean it any further. At its widest, it's 14mm but that would be closer to 19 or 20 mm across if that "wing" on the rhs hadn't been broken off or damaged. 10mm high. As is, it weighs 9.6 carats but I would estimate that at least 2 to 3 carats are host rock. Both of the convex and concave ends are about 6 mm but not really circular as much as rounded trapezium, if that make sense? I await eagerly your thoughts! M."" Dr. Smith has confirmed that it's from a turtle, probably caudal at the base of the tail. I know the above is a long read, but I've tried to explain how tedious going through 5 Kgs of potch'n'colour can be, except when one is rewarded by such a lovely little treasure!

Took the relatively short trip down to Purse State Park last weekend and had quite a bit of success! Best find was certainly a fairly large chuck of what I think is turtle shell, along with a very much alive turtle that rested with us for our lunch before returning to the water. The dream of finding anything marine mammal or a somewhat complete ray plate remains for next time!

So I just finished piecing together the remains of a partial sea turtle carapace that I dug out of a lag deposit just outside the town of Summerville in South Carolina. Anyone potentially know any taxonomic information on it, such as what genus or species it might be from? Conversion from inches to cm: 10 inches = 25cm; 5 inches = 12.5cm; 1 inch = 2.5cm

Location: Sweetwater, TX

Location: Sweetwater, TX

Location: Sweetwater, TX Petrified turtle head?

Hi everyone! When I put some cave breccia into liquid of acid acetic and water and this one came out. It long and slim seems doesn’t fit to any mammals that I know. When I used hammer to break the cave sediment, it broken into 2 part. This cave contains a lot of fossil from Pleistocene but mostly found are tooth of mammals. This is the first time I tried acid to preparation if there bone or microfossils. so please tell me if you know something about this bone. Thank for reading!