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BBC article here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-58340807 Academic article here (including co-authorship by our own @Boesse): https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.1368

Hi y'all. While visiting a local rock shop, I saw these mammal teeth in a tray labeled "shark teeth," along with actual shark teeth. I wasn't sure of what they were and decided to take them home. Their proximity to another tray of fossil cetacean teeth and their rough similarity (crown-to-root ratio) made me think they could be odontocete. Thanks for any help! @Boesse@Harry Pristis

Hi guys, I found this bone cluster on the shore of the Black Sea, near the city of Balchik, Bulgaria. From the region there have been findings of Miocene cetaceans, seals and some ground megafauna. The more circular bone somewhat reminds me of an ear bone but comparing it with pictures of fossil dolphin ear bones I can't say if it really is one. So my question is if it is an ear bone and if it is, does that mean that´s a part of a skull? Any help on the identification of the fossil will be very much appreciated! Best regards!

Found this tooth at a local rock store. It's about 2.7 cm long. I have no locality information, but I think its preservation suggests its from Lee Creek. It has worn secondary cusps, indicated by arrows. Any information would be much appreciated.

Hi Everyone! I went on a one man expedition to Matoaka Cabins last weekend, picked up some wonderful finds. but a couple pieces I discovered are puzzling me. I am all but certain they are bone. And I am also confident they are fossil based on the color, texture, and density. But Id like to know if there is any further identifying that can be done outside of them being bones? I admit its likely a bit of a long shot as they are isolated specimens, but any best guesses would be appreciated. My speculations are: long one is a cetacean rib segment. Small one is fragmentary fish vert. I can provide detailed photos of other angles if requested.

Found by a diver in SC. Was told it was possibly a genus Y dolphin lower jaw section. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Hi folks! This is my first fossil find. I was so excited that it might be a dinosaur tail bone, but after looking at a bunch of photos online it seems to certainly be cetacean. But it's so tall... Most vertebrae seem so squat and this one is rather lanky. It's just a bit bigger than a standard Pepsi can. It definitely "clinks" like a rock rather than bone but is very porous, has taken days to get the water out of it. I assume that channel is for the spinal cord, it's a bit over a half inch wide inside the channel. Here's two photos, dorsal and ventral; I could post more if you like. It was found washing onto shore after a storm brewed up some deep water shells from a channel between Gasparilla and Little Gasparilla Island in Florida (outside the Tampa Bay area). Looking forward to hearing what part of who's body this came from, thank you!

I made it out to Matoaka yesterday before today’s snowstorm and had a successful Maryland Miocene hunt, despite a large amount of ice obscuring the shoreline. (I won’t complain about the cold after @RuMert’s trip report yesterday. ) I found an unusually high number of cetacean vertebrae and cookies (epiphyses), several Ecphoras, shark teeth, and some other nice finds. This Carcharodon hastalis tooth was waiting for me when I arrived on the beach. And this cookie was just a few feet away. Off to a good start! Heading north, the ice got progressively thicker along the shoreline, and for significant stretches covered up all of the gravels at water’s edge. But there were still a few things deposited further up the tideline from before temperatures dropped below freezing. ...including my second cookie of the day. ...and my third—it’s incomplete but is the biggest one I’ve found to date. As the day went on, the sunlight started to melt some of the ice, revealing additional fossils, such as this nice little Ecphora—the colors on these always look so much better when wet! Here’s my favorite find of the day: a small partial ray mouth plate. On first glance, this looked very much like just a seed husk in the water—I’m glad I took a closer look. I didn't find a ton of shark teeth, but the ones I found were generally of good quality, including this Hemi hiding in the sand. This is a weird one. It’s only part of a tooth (croc? cetacean?) and may not be identifiable, but has a bump/ridge across the tooth—almost like a restart of the crown. Pathological perhaps? Or maybe just a tooth design I’m unfamiliar with. If anyone has ideas, let me know. I'll post another photo below and can take additional ones from other angles if helpful. Here's a decent-sized croc (I think) tooth. Most of the enamel has worn off except for a small section on the side.

We found this specimen today on the beach at Chincoteague Island, Virginia, USA. It's about 25 cm long and has a spongy looking interior. My first thought on seeing on the beach from far away was that it was a fin. Some edges are smooth suggesting that shape. But up close it's hard as a rock. Anyone know what this is?

"An almost perfectly preserved whale skeleton thought to be between 3,000 and 5,000 years old has been discovered in Thailand. " https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-55097088

I extracted this vertebrae from a 10 inch long matrix that looked like concrete. East Venice, FL, Sarasota County Pleistocene material. Lot of clay found in material adjacent to this dirt pile. I think the vert looks like image on p.341 in Fossil Vertebrates of Florida. The vertebrae is 4 inches in diameter and 4 inches high. This would be the first whale vert I found here. Mostly finding meg teeth, sloth, equus, dugong. I think it may be cetacean caudal vertebrae. I am attaching pic that looks right that I found on the net. My question is What would the estimate be of age? Would it be older than Pleistocene? I did find a Bonus 5mm micro fossil tooth in the matrix. If anyone can ID the tooth, that would be super.

Hi all, I'm hoping some of the resident experts here can help confirm or correct my IDs of the three fossil shark teeth and what I believe is a cetacean lumbar vert shown in the pictures below. I found these recently on a beach along the Calvert Cliffs in Maryland (Miocene exposure). Thanks for your help! For the shark teeth, I believe the the two on the left are both Carcharodon hastalis (though am more confident in my ID for #1) while the one on the right is possibly Isurus oxyrinchus though may also be Carcharias sp. All three have worn roots so I realize that may complicate the IDs. See pictures further below for scale bars and labial and side views of these. From pictures online, I believe this is a cetacean lumbar vertebra. The "bumpy" surface in the two lefthand photos also signifies that the epiphysis is missing, and thus this came from a juvenile, correct? Is it possible to further identify this as from a particular species or genus? Thanks in advance for your help!

Found this mandible in a rock fall at Calvert cliffs in June. I believe it’s mysticete because of the lack of tooth sockets, but am open to complete redirection if I’ve got it all wrong. Any ideas?

After posting ID questions on a couple of STH whale bones that were mostly unidentifiable, I decided I'd post images of the one whale fossil I have that seems like a slam dunk ulna (Aside from an easily ID'd ear bone.). It may be debatable as to which specific family category, but at least its location on the whale is pretty certain, right? Too bad it's a partial, but it's all I have. It looks a lot like one that is called Tiphyocetus temblorensis in an image from the California Academy of Sciences. Tiphyocetus Temblorensis Even the mottled coloring is similar. As I mentioned, this specimen is from Bakersfield, Shark Tooth Hill area specifically. While people may have seen a fair number of these, I thought it was cool enough to post an image or two of. And, people will be happy to know, I don't entertain any thoughts of its being part of a whale jaw. In fact, I'm over-jawed about having this one. Cheers.

I found more parts of the, believed to be, cetacean vertebra. I found two of the coastal facets (i just call them wings) in the same sight, an so far im still having trouble finding and goo reference photos of vertebrae that have this feature, any ideas? [WinZip file deleted]

Hi, just going through some rocks I brought back from Norfolk, UK, thinking quite a few may be fossils (I didn't have long so just grabbed anything I thought looked suspiciously organic by intuition) and as it turns out I think I was quite correct in a number of cases - I think I have quite a few pieces of whale and and a few little bits of mammoth tooth. Trying to confirm this to myself led to a lot of reading and learning online about the local geological formations involved and also whale anatomy, both new topics for me which I always enjoy delving into - part of the enjoyment of fossil hunting for me - I'm less of someone looking for beautiful specimens for display (though I'm not going to turn those down!) and more someone who loves the detective work of trying to identify obscure parts and recreate some aspect of the vanished world before us from its traces. And searching through whale anatomy and what these weird chunks could be I came across a picture of a whale periotic and realised that the weird little pot structure I had was almost definitely one of these, which if I am correct is good because I believe they are one part of a fragmented whale anatomy that is quite diagnostic. Also I then realised that a strangely hooked piece I found right next to it could well be the tympanic! The preservation here is unusual because many theorise that these kind of whale fossils were first laid down in sandstone in the Miocene when Norfolk was covered with a shallow warm sea, and then later in the Pliocene and early Pleistocene when temperatures dropped sea levels dropped too and the area became land (part of the reason the geology of this area is interesting is the constant transgression and regression of the sea over a few million years), these Miocene rocks were eroded away and the harder fossils reworked into new estuarine or nearshore sediments of this era, often but not always with a layer of hard iron-rich concretion coating them which helped protect them (I guess one question would be, is there anyway of easily removing this hard concretion layer?) So if I am right, these are bones from Miocene whales (many showing signs of shark damage), reburied in the Pliocene / Early Pleistocene and then finally eroded out again in the modern day - quite a journey! Anyway, enough background, for starters I'd love to see what people think about this periotic / tympanic. Am I right? Here's a summary of my findings (note I used a pic of dolphin periotic someone posted here for comparison so I hope that isn't too cheeky)

This tooth has me stumped. I'd love to have your thoughts. Is it from a ziphiid? Something else? Any chance it isn't cetacean? It was found in the Eastover Formation in eastern Virginia.

Friends of ours had their daughter come to visit for the holidays. She likes to rockhound and collect crystals and pan for gold back in the Seattle area where she lives and was eager to try the experience of fossil hunting in the Peace River. The weather (and river level) was looking good till a few days back when that huge mass of unstable air over the southeastern US unleashed torrents of rain. In fact, we were kidding Kelly that it was her presence here that brought the Seattle weather. She had a red-eye flight into Fort Lauderdale airport a few days back and on the morning of her arrival, the FLL airport received 4.5 inches of rain in an hour--shutting down the airport due to runways that were under water! Her flight was diverted to Miami but the airline she was on does not normally fly to MIA and there were no gates nor attendants to great the flight. They sat on the tarmac for 3.5 hours till they could find someone to unload the plane. Of course, they couldn't manage to unload the luggage at Miami and so the plane flew up to Fort Lauderdale later in the day so that the passengers could finally be reunited with their luggage. Hope there were no cruise passengers on that flight or their holiday vacation was well ruined. The bulk of the rain went north and south of the Peace River drainage basin but it did catch enough to push the river level into movement in the wrong direction. Canoe Outpost (where we rented our canoes) has been measuring the river level in Arcadia by calling the "normal" river level the point at which their floating dock is level with the bottom stair of their fixed dock. They declare fossil hunting season "open" when the level is 12" BELOW this "normal" level. The rain had pushed the level to around 9" ABOVE normal or just under 2 feet higher than I'd have liked it to be. We only had Saturday available as a date to try this and so we did. At worst we figured we'd have a relaxing trip down the river by canoe--in the rain! (Did I forget to mention the weather forecast was for warm temps, near 83F, but with an 80% chance of rain?) We chose a 10:00 a.m. departure over my normal choice of 8:00 a.m. which maximizes the workable time on the river with the canoes due back in before 5:00 p.m. This let us sleep in just a few hours more with a departure of 6:00 a.m. instead of 4:00 a.m. We loaded ourselves and the fossil hunting gear, snacks, and change of clothes into our friend's minivan and were off very nearly on schedule. It was an overcast (but dry) trip across state to Arcadia where we arrived in good time to sign in and catch our bus to the put in. We were pleasantly surprised to find Canoe Outpost to be celebrating their 50th year in operation (and Becky, the owner, there for 35 of those years). The peace sign in much of their signs is both a reference to the Peace River and the summer of love that was 1969. To celebrate, the canoe rentals were half-price and our two canoes for the day came for the price of one. I was quite happy to find that, though the levels were higher than I'd hoped for, the large well known gravel bed just downstream from the put-in at Brownville Park was not too deep to work. The current toward the center of the river was ripping and made it tricky to stand up and keep sand/gravel on your shovel as you raised it from the bottom to the sifter. One side of the river was protected somewhat by some trees in the water just upstream and was easily workable. The waist-deep water was comfortably cool (78F) and high enough not to have to bend over much but not too high to work effectively. There were a few other canoes launched with our group but they rolled past us when we stopped to start fossil hunting. We spotted a few additional canoes pass us from the 11:00 a.m. put-in but otherwise (mostly) had the river to ourselves. A large group (tour?) of 9 jet skis came flying up the river while we were taking a lunch break. They slowed just a bit but the wakes definitely caused a stir as the combined waves smacked our canoes pulled up along shore. We were to encounter them again on their return trip downstream a few hours later. This time we were paddling and had to move to the side of the river and point the bow of the canoes into the huge waves to keep from capsizing. Jet skis and canoes simply do not mix well. At least nobody flipped over. It remained a cloudy day with the sun only making a few brief appearances to cast some color on our sifting screens filled with black gravel. We got sprinkled and full-on poured upon several times throughout the day but Tammy even remarked that the warm air temps and a windbreaker jacket actually made the rainy canoe paddling rather pleasant. The warm temps had a number of gators (big and small) out trying to sun themselves on the banks. In total we spotted an even dozen of them in the first half of the trip back to Arcadia. There are fewer good haul-up spots and the fading light toward late afternoon usually means we see few if any gators on the last half of the paddle back downstream. It was interesting seeing the new tree falls along the banks and the other changes to the topography of the river after the summer's floods. It appears that someone's boat had come loose and found itself in a rather non-seaworthy state among the willow trees along one bank. A good example of the power of the river in flood stage! We tried to get into a deeper spot on the river that for some unknown reason is chocked full of dugong rib bones. It has larger chunky gravel and so I like to look there for the promise of larger fossils (like meg teeth). I like to take newbies to the river to this site as they can then collect multiple "paleo paperweights" as I call them and maybe come away with a meg tooth (or at least a decent fragment). We pulled to canoes to the bank at this spot and I got out to check it for depth. The bottom usually slopes down from a sticky/slipper/stinky muddy bank into a deeper channel a few meters from shore before becoming more shallow rising up onto a bit of a sand bank. I walked (slid) out into deeper water and got to neck level without it ever getting shallower and so (as I feared) this site was simply impossible at this river level. We paddled on to a final spot I like to stop at which has only fine pea gravel but often provides a copious number of smaller dime size shark teeth. I enjoy taking groups with kids there as we have a competition to see how many shark teeth per screen we can find. I believe the record still stands at 26. This site is also quite shallow (even dry sand bars when the river is good and low) and so I knew we'd have no problems there--it was my ace in the hole in case the other locations were all not accessible. In addition to many nice tiny teeth it also delivered some surprises.

Hi again from West KY. Hope these photos are OK. I've wrestled with them for a couple hours now. (LOL) This was found with some others while I was walking a creek in the Jackson Purchase area of KY, Graves County to be exact. This was on the surface, as were the others, all near each other. They look to have been washed out, as the banks of the creek are, in some places, as high as 15 - 20 ft. The other side was cut out in the 1800's to make a railroad track. The ruler didn't come out clearly, but, this measures about 9mm x 7mm x 5mm, weighs 552g. This area is known to have been under water, but most of the fossils I find are the small ones. When I saw this, I wondered if it was possible to have had a creature this large swimming HERE? That led to learning about the Western Interior Seaway, and yes, it DID reach here, (very exciting!). After researching this and another bone found with it, I came to think that it was a possible cetacean with signs of Osedax, during the Cretaceous perhaps. (?) After reading about Osedax, I found that now, the various species usually are separate from each other, but that in the W.I.S., many species would feed off of the same bones. *I added a photo of one of the others found with it. Just the one. I've second-guessed myself 1000 times about this and the other "bones", looked for other things that seemed more plausible, and been through tons of photos, websites, & scientific papers. The University of KY website didn't help to squash my excitement - here's a quote from them: "Cretaceous sediments are almost completely absent in Kentucky; only small areas of Cretaceous deposits occur in and near the Jackson Purchase Region in extreme western Kentucky. During most of the Cretaceous, Kentucky was land. If Cretaceous sediments covered any of this land, they have since been eroded away. However, during latest Cretaceous times, sea level rise coupled with subsidence in the Jackson Purchase Region led to deposition of coastal sediments in environments that included coastal plain, river, delta, and shallow sea. Because of the limited outcrops in the flat Jackson Purchase Region, very little in the way of fossils have been found in the Cretaceous sediments there. The most common fossils are coalified tree limbs. The potential exists for dinosaur fossils to be found in these sediments in Kentucky. Much more new research needs to be done on the Cretaceous in this region." I know some of you all can help, and it's very much appreciated! Even if it IS nothing more than a coral or whatever, at least I will know!

My wife and I took a trip fown to Maryland late last week for a little calvert formation hunting at Bayfront park. As i mentioned on another post we got to the beach at quarter to 7am and had the place to ourselves for a while. Nobody was there to collect our access fee so we walked down to the beach just after low tide. One set of footprints were just above the surf line but i never did see who made them as nobody passed us either direction all day. We both found a couple of small teeth on our walk from the enterance to the corner that juts ou. My wife decided to stay in yhe corner and screen while i walked further south. For me it was a very slow pick of small shark teeth and a small cetacean tooth by the time I returned. My wife found a small cetacean vert where she set up to screen. More smalls than i remember from my last trip, or maybe we were just better at spotting them. She found her first Squatina subserrata tooth. Here's our finds, scale on the right is in inches: Close up of some of the smalls, these are under a quarter of an inch and we were lucky they stayed in our screens (and that we saw them): Makes me think I should try a multi layered sifter stack just to see how much micro material is falling through.

I know this is a cetacean ear bone and I know it is from Sharktooth Hill but that is ablut all I know for sure. It is pretty large at 3" long and 1.5'' wide which would seem to rule out of the smaller dolphin-like whales. My first thought was Aulophyseter morreci. It could also be a mysticeti as well. Regardless of species, it is a really nice addition to our STH whale collection.

I went to the Ernst Quarry a few weeks back and found a lot of teeth. I've never gone shark tooth collecting, so this was a very new experience that I really enjoyed. However as I know next to nothing about shark tooth identification, I have several teeth that are puzzling me. Ive tried using the elasmo site and the handout I was given at the quarry, but these don't match up. Apologies for the photos, my phone isn't too keen on very small items. If they are not good enough I can try to take a couple more. No serrations on either of these 2 teeth as far as I can tell.

Hello! I found this a few days ago in Parrish, FL at my fossil site. Not quite like anything I ever found before. It is 1 3/4” (44mm) long. It appears to have a hole running through the middle. The thinner tip looks chipped and the wider end has evidence of ridges that look like a walnut or similar. At first I thought seed or nut, but now that I keep looking it almost looks like a cetacean tooth. Really have no clue. Please help ID. Thanks so much.

hi all, Here are three teeth from the Pliocene Yorktown at LC. When found, I was told "pilot whale", which hasn't helped much. I do believe that they are from a tooth cetacean though. Could anyone hazard a guess as to genus/species? thanks in advance