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Showing results for tags 'cenozoic'.
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Howdy from the frontier country of New Mexico! I'm Tammy. I stumbled upon this forum while trying to categorize a very large collection of interesting fossil specimens collected in the mid to southwest of New Mexico, by our daughter Carol (an avid fossil collector). During her last visit we separated some of the largest specimens, revering some more than others, discussing the cosmos and the earliest life forms on planet Earth. We recalled that Carol collected rocks as souvenirs from vacations. On a vacation to Minnesota, Carol collected a '(flat) rock'; it was a decade later when she realized it was actually a prehistoric tool! I'm positive that's what started it all! I hope you can forgive our lack of 'technical' terms and a few run-on sentences now and then, as we attempt to analyze and understand this collection. I'm off to read and learn! Sincerest gratitude, Tammy
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Just got back from the Orlando Fossil Fair 2018, I bought some nice fossils but many were not identified and I want to confirm ID's for ones that were. There's a lot of fossils so I'll label each one with information and my own opinon on them. All the fossils shown are allegedly carnivores and found in the Suwannee River in Florida (excluding two of them). The furthest on the left will be #1, and the furthest on the right will be #4. I'm not convinced that 1 is a carnivore but besides that I don't have any hypothesis on what the others could be. The left one in this picture is 5, the one on the right is 6. Five reminds me of a bear, and I don't have any idea what 6 is or if it's even a carnivore. The tooth will be 7 the jaw will be 8, both are allegedly dire wolves (they're not associated) from 'Northern Florida', I don't have an exact locality unfortunately. I suspect these both belong to dire wolves. The furthest left will be 9, and the furthest right is 11. I suspect 9 and 10 to be racoon teeth, but I'm not sure if racoons are found in the Suwannee river. At first I thought 11 was a canid, but after looking at it for awhile it looks more like a feline. This last specimen will be 12, right now I'm stuck between a primitive canid (possibly leptocyon) a feline, or some sort of fox. This specimen was also found in the Suwannee, like the rest except the dire wolves. If you need more pictures I can take some and post them within the hour. Thanks in advance!
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I obtained this mammal jaw at the Colorado School of Mines Geology Garage Sale a couple of years ago in a box of rocks that had been detached from their labels and so lost much of their scientific value. That made the box of rocks cheap, but it means that I am on my own to figure out what all of it is and have no location information at all. I am hoping that someone on here will maybe recognize it enough to steer me in the right direction for even a higher taxonomic level identification. I am more than happy to provide photographs from any additional angles that would be helpful so please just ask! Any thoughts are greatly appreciated!
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So, I found this today in the Paleocene Aquia Formation of Maryland. Obviously it can't be an ammonite, because they were already extinct. It's a Nautilus steinkern, right, not some sort of gastropod? Thanks! Matt
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Hi, It's been a while since I've put anything up on here so it figured it would a good time to share some of my finds from this spring so far. With such a productive winter the start of this spring on the Bouldnor Fm. coast was a bit slow with several trips in which little was found (odd for what is usually a heavily productive site) but as March and April came round the finds started coming in faster and better. Access at Bouldnor is now very dangerous and pretty much impassable due to thick and deep silt and mud which has covered part of the beach (which I found out the hard way trying to get through), along with two recent cliff falls which have brought several oak trees down onto the beach. Hamstead and Cranmore are as good as ever with a lot of the winter's mudflows now eroding away and making the foreshore a lot easier. (Hamstead Ledge on a spring low tide) Mammal finds have been pretty nice so far this spring, as usual all Bothriodon, and alongside them I've also made some nice alligator and turtle finds including two partial Emys in-situ in the Upper Hamstead Mbr. Here are some of the highlights: 1. More pieces of the large Bothriodon mandible I first found in January have turned up scattered over the same area. I now have part of the hinge, two sections with P2 - M3 and a part of the underside of the mandible from further forward. I regularly check the site on my collecting trips so hopefully yet more of the jaw will turn up. (The positions of the fragments may be slightly off in the image below but it gives a general idea) 2. Bothriodon caudal vertebra. This is one of my favourite finds from this spring. I was originally excavating a small micro-vertebrate site when I felt the tool make contact with a large bone, I dug a bit deeper into the clay and found this vertebra with the processes fragmented around it. Luckily with a bit of super glue the processes were easily reunited with the vertebral body, after 33 million years apart. Unfortunately I couldn't locate the other transverse process or neural spine in the matrix nearby so I think they may have been broken off on the Oligocene coastal plain. 3. Bothriodon upper molar in a fragment of maxilla 4. Section of Bothriodon mandible with a nice mental foramen. Unfortunately no in-situ teeth with this one. 5. Section of mammalian limb bone with evidence of rodent gnawing. This was an in-situ find eroding out of the Upper Hamstead Mbr. on the foreshore. Gnaw marks like these are really common on in-situ material especially on limb bones. I don't think the rodents were scavenging the flesh off the bones, more likely they were extracting calcium and phosphate or were simply using it to grind down their continually growing incisors. Either way it shows that for at least a period a lot of these bones were exposed to the elements and accessible to the variety of rodents present on the coastal plain. 6. Nice quality Bothriodon intermedial phalange 7. Large Diplocynodon alligator frontal bone Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoyed the finds! Theo
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Happy March break TTF! I hope you all had a fantastic holiday! I have just gotten back from a fantastic trip to Florida. Thanks to TTF, I was lucky to discover the peace river. This discovery caused an entire re-write of my family's vacation plans. My father, who was also looking forward to walking through a swamp, agreed to join me on an expedition there. This was my first fossil hunting trip in Florida. I would also like to give my thanks and free advertising to Fossil Funatics, the tour operator who organized the hunt and provided the resources for us. We had a very successful two days. The guy is truly helpful, knowledgable, and fun to be around. He kindly gave all of his Dugong ribs and some of his shark teeth to me. We actually went to a stream which feeds into the actual peace river. As soon as we arrived there, I found myself overtaken by a sudden obsession with Dugong bones, earning my the titular nickname given to me by my dad. Since I have literally hundreds fossils from the river, this post will be dedicated to the Dugong bones. More posts on this are to follow! Enjoy!
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From the album: ECHINOIDS & OTHER INVERTEBRATES
Chalcedony (Beekite) replacing a section of calcareous clam burrow. Kuphus sp. is Cenozoic in age with one extant species. It is reputed to be the longest clam that ever existed.© Harry Pristis, 2018
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I found this miocene fossil from Pohang, Korea. I think spots near the abdomen is Light organs. Is this order Stomiiformes? Size about 4cm
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Hi, I thought I'd share some of my best finds from what has been a brilliant start to collecting in 2018! The Isle Of Wight has been hit by heavy storms, with torrential rain and gale force winds, numerous times over the last month or so. This has caused some serious erosion and slipping to the soft clay cliffs and foreshore of the Bouldnor Fm. and the coast has been highly productive. I've made some of the best finds of my fossil hunting "career" (if that's the right term for it), including some very nice large mammal finds that I have dreamed of coming across for a while now. 1. The partial cranium of a mammal. This is without a doubt one of my best finds. I collected it ex-situ from the foreshore and at first thought I was looking at a large piece of fossil wood, which are common in some of the fluvial and freshwater horizons of the Lower Hamstead Member. Luckily I spotted the cancellous bone texture, and quickly realised it was a large piece of mammal skull. The cranium is essentially the left portion of the brain case with the parietal bone, part of the frontal bone, jaw articulation surfaces and saggital crest with scars from the temporalis muscle. The brain case is filled with sediment and Viviparus gastropods, which may be the culprits for the extensive mollusc bore marks on the parietal bone. There is also a Stratiotes seed in one of the gastropod shells indicating the skull was deposited in a shallow (less than 6.5m deep) freshwater pool, probably already broken. Skulls like this are incredibly rare, and I've heard that it looks like it was probably out on the shore for just a couple of hours! As usual with my big or unusual finds I took it straight in to Dinosaur Isle Museum where it's currently on loan for preparation and identification in case it's an important find. I believe it may be something like an Anoplotherium although I'm not sure. 2. Partial Bothriodon mandible. This is a really cool find that I've always wanted to come across! Bothriodon is an abundant part of the Post-Grande Coupure mammal fauna, arriving in Europe and Britain around 33.6 million years ago from Asia. This was facilitated by the Oi-1 glaciation event in Antartica lowering global sea levels and opening up several migration routes from Asia into Europe for a myriad of immigrant taxa. The habitat of the early Oligocene Hampshire Basin was ideal for the proposed lifestyles of anthracotheres (low lying coastal plain with wetlands, lakes, and open woodland), which along with a preservation bias, makes Bothriodon the most common large mammal encountered. I found this jaw in two pieces, 14 days apart and 5m from each other in a mudflat at low tide. The bone is heavily crushed and has P2 - M3 in-situ, although P1 is missing (possibly pre-fossilisation) and I still haven't found the other jaw section with the M2 (fingers crossed it'll turn up one of these days!). I think the jaw washed out of the Upper Hamstead Member during this winter's storms and smashed into several pieces which were subsequently scattered over the immediate area. (P1 to M1 section found 14 days after the M3)
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Cheek tooth from the theridomyid rodent Isoptychus sp. Collected through screen washing of matrix from the 'White Band' a shallow freshwater lacustrine horizon.
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I found this sharks tooth at Harleyville Quarry in South Carolina. It is very, very small. Does anyone know what it is? It dates back to the Cenozoic.
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Some kind of invertebrate from they Harleyville Quarry. I'm not sure what it is. I feel like this is a common fossil since I found so many and I am going to feel stupid after this. Ha ha ha.
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Hi, I headed out for a full day of collecting at Hamstead on Saturday, and thought I'd share how it went. I reached the beach at Hamstead Duver around 9am and began searching the foreshore. The finds on this part of the coast are washed round by longshore drift, but it can be a productive section. This was definitely the case on Saturday, within the first 20 odd metres I picked up various pieces of trionychid carapace, Emys fragments, and the worn trochlea of an anthracothere humerus. I continued west along the coast before reaching the slipway (a disused boat launching ramp, apparently used by the US military in preparation for the Normandy Landings) the point where Hamstead Cliffs begin. Having not been able to visit in nearly a month, and after weeks of pretty violent storms over Christmas and the New Year, the coast at Hamstead Ledge has now completely changed. Most of the sand and gravel has been taken off the beach leaving large exposed areas of Bembridge Marls strata on the foreshore. The junction bed between the underlying Bembridge Limestone and Bembridge Marls is also now visible (usually obscured by sand and gravel). The Bembridge Limestone Fm. lays beneath the Bouldnor Fm. and was laid down in a series of large carbonate lakes on a heavily forested sub-tropical coastal plain stretching across what is now the northern Island. At 34.0 million years ago rising sea levels flooded the plain and the estuary/lagoons of the lower Bembridge Marls were deposited, which can be observed in the low cliff face. (A small normal fault can be seen in the Bembridge Marls highlighted in yellow, additionally the 'thin white horizon' is the western limits of the famous Insect Limestone. However it is un-lithified and does not produce insects at this locality) The largest change however was an enormous landslide just west of the ledge in the high cliff face. As well as several smaller falls and slips, this slip has littered the beach with clay debris and small trees. It's on the site of a large mudflow from last winter, I reckon the heavy rain saturated the already weakened area and triggered a large scale failure of the cliff face. I checked through the debris (and the exposed strata) and found some very nice pieces, including a huge piece of trionychid hypoplastron (the largest turtle piece I've ever found), a fragment of alligator jaw, a large fish vertebra, and two large baso-occipital bones from Bowfins (Amia sp.). As the beach was covered with clay blocks the foreshore wasn't very productive for ex-situ finds. As the tide dropped I moved further west towards Cranmore and beach conditions returned to normal with shingle, sand, and gravel, and a nice variety of finds. The best finds were a couple of anthracothere teeth, including a very nice canine. Coprolites were also very common as usual, most, if not all, are likely crocodilian. Further west there are exposures of the Upper Hamstead Member on the foreshore which if you're lucky turn up in-situ finds. The Upper Hamstead Member dates from approximately 33.2 - 32.4 million years ago. This time I was in luck, I spotted a large bone fragment and a piece of Emys weathering out of the clay. I checked the areas adjacent in case there was anymore associated material but unfortunately not. The bone fragment appears to be a rib. I reached Cranmore and collected some matrix for micro-sieving from the cliff face, and after collecting a few more bone fragments and coprolites, and with the tide now rising I called it a day and headed up to the main road. Overall it was a good collecting trip, with some good finds. Hopefully as the winter goes on the landslide debris is eroded away and some nice vertebrate remains are produced. Hope this was interesting, Theo 1. Huge piece of trionychid hypoplastron 2. 'Interior' view of the hypoplastron
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Now if you’ve seen my previous posts you might know I have shark teeth and while most are probably just modern sharks and aren’t technically fossils yet. One of them not only doesn’t look like many of the others, it’s small and looks fossilized. Although it’s probably from the Cenozoic in my opinion. The point is if you have a idea of species of shark this tooth belonged to. Please tell
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Hey guys! Found this Oreodont skull in an old man's collection. I'm more of a dinosaur guy, and can't find any good Oreodont references. Can you help?
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Although fossil finding was not part of our vacation itinerary, fossils found us. After our boat docked outside of the strip just outside the town of Montego Bay, there was a large shelf of limestone filled with coral fossils. I had just been snorkelling in the living coral reef at Secrets Bay, and it was fabulous to see corals in living colour with all those abundant tropical fish eddying about. The limestone here dates between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic, and is largely dominated by coral. Some of the specimens in the rock have very nicely defined corallites. As I didn't think to bring a rock hammer on vacation, I did manage to find a loose rock to hack out a few small specimens. This first batch shows these corals in their raw, in situ context:
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After some research on the geological structure of my home state - West Virginia, It has come to my attention that what I once thought to be a land barren of fossils is actually very large plethora of different age rocks being oldest - extreme east, and newest rocks - to the west. But something odd turned up on some of the maps and papers in my scavenging through records of professors in paleontology or geological surveys: Quaternary rocks are riddled all throughout the state, almost as if a large region was once covered but now is reduced and weathered away into small outcrops in random places. I have known for a long time that the state fossil, Megalonyx Jeffersoni, is from the obvious newer rocks. However, the discovery of this skeleton was not dug up but rather found in a sealed cave away from the forces of nature. If I were to visit an area where these rocks are present, could I expect any turn-ups or just expect to find rocks that are of the age but contain absolutely nothing. Cenozoic fauna are definitely not my specialty (far from it, Cambrian) but I'd be willing to check it out after some research by me and input from others. PS, I certainly do not expect to go to an area like this and find fossil of a mammoth or saber-toothed tiger or any such animal (<-- I believe these aren't native to the area), but even the impression of anything could lead me on a journey that, again, I'd be willing to take. Here's the photo that is the reason I am typing this right now-
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Hello, I bought this shark tooth for $1.98 at a variety store in a box of miscellaneous shark teeth thinking there might be a remote chance that it was a posterior tooth of one of the large Carcharodon such as C. megalodon. It had no locality data, but it was worth the risk to me for pocket change if it is an aforementioned posterior. Was hoping some of the shark-teeth experts could take a peek. Thanks very much.
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Possibly it's just me, or does it seem there are far less posts about fossils in the west. Has this site morphed into a Paleozoic forum?
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Common fish from the Green River Formation in Wyoming.
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From the album: Breezy Point, Calvert Cliffs Maryland 9/16/16
Assortment of ray plates. The plate top right is one of the biggest plates I've ever found intact. -
From the album: Breezy Point, Calvert Cliffs Maryland 9/16/16
Here's another view of the teeth with special attention to the larger fragment near the center. This piece is most likely a great white or other large predatory shark. I doubt it's a megalodon, but it could be or one of it's smaller cousins. I've found meg shards at the cliffs before. -
These are all from the Sooke Fm, southern Vancouver Isl . I previously found cetacean vertebrae at this locality (see thread at http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php/topic/29164-cenozoic-vert/). Here are some new finds, with my guesses (I stress these are uneducated guesses) at what they might be: The first is a centrum (shark?) approx 2 inches in diameter: The next two pics were found beside one another (less than 2 inches apart); the first appears to be a scapula (poorly preserved) while the second appears to be an atlas vertebra, possibly from a small cetacean? : This last one has me completely stumped. Small shore-line mammals have been found here in the past, as well as cetaceans and desmostylus. The only thing I can find online that looks even remotely like this is a cetacean "earbone" - could this be a fragment of one? : Maybe Boesse will see this and weigh in. Any help anyone can give me would be much appreciated. Lastly, if anyone has a copy of The Fauna of the Sooke Formation (Clark & Arnold, 1923) and a link they can post, I'd sure appreciate it. I can't seem to get my hands on a copy of that paper. Thanks everyone for looking. Cheers Steve
