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Here is my latest trip to POC. Another nice large tooth (I took a picture with a cm ruler for the non-Americans out there), some mastodon or mammoth enamel, a few nice ptychodus, chunkasaurus, and several chunks of matrix with teeth sticking out of them. I also had a few questionables. Anyone know what kind of tooth is in pictures 5 and 6? Or 7 and 8? Im thinking 9,10, and 11? 12, 13, and 14 might be crushed crustacean or coprolite? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

I haven’t posted in a while so I figured I should get involved again! We took a trip to New Jersey recently to see what we could find. Luck was on our side this time. It was the first time my son has gone hunting with me, it was incredibly special and memorable. Here’s our finds from our time, nothing crazy but a few nice finds!

Are these coprolites or simply nodules/concretions? I have zero knowledge on how to distinguish a coprolite, other than that these materials have a distinct, smooth shape that I could certainly envision reptilian poop looking like. But so do concretions oftentimes. These come from the Bladen/Tar Heel formations of North Carolina from an area known to preserve coprolites. Btw I read the coprolite ID thread and these appear to meet some of the criteria, although they’re not porous enough for the “lick” test, and I haven’t had a chance to view them under a microscope yet.

Hi all! So I recently posted regarding a bone ID on a mystery mosasaur/dinosaur vertebra (I’m leaning towards it being a mosasaur vert.). The vert. came out of either the Cretaceous Bladen or Tar Heel formations of North Carolina from a marine site that yields dinosaurs, crocs, mosasaurs, turtles, and fish (including sharks). Well, I went back through the material I had collected (from the same site as the vert.) and found what I believe are a worn tooth and a fragment of what I believe to be the proximal end of a femur (although I could very well be wrong on that). The tooth I would have thought to be croc or mosasaur, but it is not conical (it’s more “chisel”-like), and I haven’t seen anything quite like it. The “femur”, as far as I can tell from looking up images...appears to be dinosaurian, but I’m not sure. Any help would be greatly appreciated as my knowledge of zoological anatomy is limited **Update: I checked the “femur” under a microscope, I don’t see any bone histology, I think it’s just a concretion of some sort. Wasn’t sure because so many of the bones from this site are worn down. But of course the tooth is definitely a tooth. No idea on the ID still.

Hi, I recently found a bone that looks like either a vertebra or a phalanges. The bone is from eastern North Carolina, legally collected from public land, and comes out of either the Cretaceous Tar Heel or Bladen formations. Both marine and freshwater organisms as well as dinosaurs are known to be found from the general area. The bone does not look like it comes from a turtle or crocodile, but I could be wrong. Is it a dinosaur or mosasaur bone, or something else? And no, there is no way this bone is Cenozoic. Thanks!

Here are some photos of Myanmar amber taken with my new camera. I am sure must of you have your method of photographing amber. So here is mine, first I submerge the piece of amber in Mineral oil, which usually flattens the image keeping most of the inclusion in focus. It also will make some of the micro cracks on the surface of the amber disappear. I can sometimes move the amber around to keep the lamp used to see the object out of the photo. Let me know how you do it. You may have a better way. I will only put two photos on at a time. 1. First is a stinkbug at 20x. 2. Leaf at 20x,

The last weekend of September, I decided to visit some of my central Texas sites. I had been looking for a tetragamma for some time - the first one I found was collected illegally, totally by mistake, on federal property. And it was far from a perfect specimen. Well, after a few years of being teased by broken tetragamma bits, I found this beauty. I believe this is a tetragamma streeuwitizi - collected from comanche peak limestone. Please forgive the situ pic, motion picture was activated, and the sun was too bright to tell that it was a poor quality image until later. Initially thought was a phymosoma sp., until I got home and realized it was a tetra - totally stoked!!! Pic #3 also shows that my tetra retained one of her (yes, I just humanized my urchin) spines!!! This is a first for me. Thanks to @Uncle Siphuncle for cluing me into the rarity of tetragamma a few years back.

Just returned from my fall collecting trip to South Dakota. Will focus on my finds and I've attached a couple of prior trips to see more of the area, fauna, finds and collecting gear. Spring 2021 http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/115998-spring-dinosaur-dig-in-south-dakota/ Fall 2020 http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/109554-collecting-trip-hell-creek-formation/#comments Before I get into my new finds here are some prepped items from my last two trips that I have yet to share A possible Troodontid metatarsal A very weird bone, showed Pete Larsen and he's leaning to a pathologic Digit III Edmontosaurus toe bone. Very odd bone. Good size An nice size Edmontosaurus cervical vertebra about 7.8" High and 13.5" wide Edmontosaurus, a big Chevron, 14.5" long Edmontosaurus, Metacarpal III - 10" Long I was cleaning this Edmontosaurus Digit IV -1 toe bone and a surprise hole popped up became more interesting as I continued clearing it. It has the outer shape and interior profile/curvature of a tyrannosaurid tooth. Is it predation ? I went to show it to Pete Larsen but he was at the Denver show.. Will see him at Tucson. There was no predation marks on the opposite side so not sure. The preservation is pretty solid. Edmontosaurus - Left Dentary about 23 inches long.

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!

I found this fossil gastropod on an auction site and I really liked it. But the information is a bit confusing. On the title it states that it is Cretaceous but in the description of the seller it says "Cretaceous-Oxfordian-160 MYA". Oxfordian is a period from the Jurassic, not the Cretaceous. The locality & species (theres 2 species) Location: Kostroma Region Russia Species: Pictavia laevigata & Exelissa quinariia .

Hello, sure I can not beat the lovely pics, scenery and fossils posted recently by @RuMert, but I also had a nice fossil encounter two days ago (10/02/2021). After prospecting for Pb-Zn-Ba with friends from Lower Austria in the area of Peggau, I decided to visit Römaskogel in Kainach again (just 20 km away), especially to take home a big rudist specimen still waiting there. Arriving there, I decided to check out the surroundings of two recently (some weeks ago) found Vaccinites (quite a distance away from the already known occurrences), on the way to that specimen. Just 50 m away from the car, still far above of the two earlier found specimens, I encountered the first rudist, freely lying on the forest floor. And the next near it, and the next and so on. In total, about 20 specimens were just lying around in the forest in an area of a few 100 m2. And I did not search hard, because most time I tried to find the exposure with these rudists. A step ledge was promising, showing some overgrown exposures of conglomerate. Well, at the northern edge of this ledge, I really found an "outcrop" with rudists, but it could also be a block. I don´t know yet. Anyways, further detailed prospecting is urgently needed ("The Never Ending Story" ). This is the first rudist site in the northern Kainach Gosau with scattered and freely visible rudists not related to forest road construction. The fossil site shown here belongs to the "Upper Rudist Zone" with conglomeratic host rock of the lower Afling-formation (upper Santonian - lower Campanian). All rudists found so far are Vaccinites sp. Map showing fossiliferous zones of the northern Kainach Gosau. The site presented here is the northeastern extension of the dark blue "Hangende Rudisten-Zone". First rudist encounter of that day, near the home of a badger. The pen has a total length of 13.7 cm, the red part is 3.9 cm long, and all rudists are photographed in-situ, unless mentioned otherwise: Just a meter or so away, the second rudist near a root (pen!): And the next one, a slender, nearly complete one, some shell is missing, though: And the next one nearby, not very obvious (below the red x), but its a short fragment of a Vaccinites: The next one near a big root. Not well visible on the larger pics, but this was a real surprise, see last pic... Ups, turned out to be a large, nearly complete Vaccinites, nearly 20 cm long. The opposite site is a little bit crushed, but that´s ok, nobody is perfect . And so on and so on... This is the supposed outcrop as found (below the red x), very tiny (as everything in Austria ), and a loose rudist specimen near the pen. You can imagine something like a ledge in that area, if you like : "Outcrop" a little bit cleaned: Loose specimen in detail, a fragment of a big Vaccinites: "Outcrop" in detail: "Outcrop" after excavation. Its a pseudocolony of several Vaccinites, already broken into 4 pieces. Haven´t explored the "scenery" behind that pieces yet. Maybe its part of a larger outcrop, probably not: And last, something geological. Here and there you can find quite big boulders mostly made of fossil-free limestone or dolostone in the northern Kainach Gosau. This is a dolostone boulder of at least one cubic meter in size. Its a giant clast within the conglomerates and probably of paleozoic age: Hope you enjoyed a litte bit, thanks for looking. I am still very surprised and somewhat excited by that find, the first area with naturally free lying rudists of the northern Kainach Gosau. You never know whats behind the next tree, even in such a supposed fossil-poor area like the Kainach Gosau. Prospecting is everything ! Franz Bernhard