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I am excited to finally announce my first contribution to science! This is a section of dentary/beak of a Pelagornis cf. sandersi from the Ashley Formation in Summerville, South Carolina. This was found in December 2023 and has been donated to the new Charleston Center for Paleontology, where it will reside in their collections. A paper featuring it and other Pelagornis sandersi fossils from the area (which there aren't many of) is in progress. Here it is after prep:

Hi all, This jaw was just listed on a particular auction site and caught my eye. Locality according to the seller is Hell Creek formation, Montana. The fossil is 15mm long. Their ID is just "dinosaur" of unknown species. To my amateur eyes, the size and "shelf" on the inside of the bone makes me think lizard, but the teeth really look like those of dromaeosaurs. Any thoughts on ID? Lizard, juvenile dromaeosaur, or bird even?

Hi everyone, this is my first post on here. This specimen was labelled as a 'dinosaur jaw bone' and it was found in the Hell Creek Formation near Glendive, Montana. It is about 27 mm long. It does seem to me it belongs to a reptile of some sort but I haven't been able to find anything on the internet to identify it with any more specificity so I'd really appreciate your expertise in identifying it. Thanks everyone!

MONTANA, Rosebud County find but within eyesight of Garfield County. This was not found in situ but recovered at the bottom of a wash along with dozens of other fragments. The smaller piece attached below is from the same section. Size of dental battery is 9"x4". Size of smaller tooth section is 3"x2".

Hello! I recently got this tooth as a birthday present. It's a roughly .5" tyrannosaur tooth from the Hell Creek formation. I'm pretty confident this is a Tyrannosaurus tooth based on the very circular thick base, but I wanted to check in case it could possibly something else. Also, when I first looked at it I thought it was an anterior dentary tooth, but now I'm starting to think it may be a lateral dentary tooth. I was hoping someone could tell me roughly which position it would be in? I can provide any additional pictures. The tooth is very worn, and I circled both sets serrations so they would be easier to find. I think my favorite thing about this tooth is how worn it is, because that means it was used a lot in life. Thanks in advance for any help!

Had another busy and enjoyable afternoon volunteering at the FLMNH vertebrate paleontology warehouse which was part of the reason why Tammy and I moved up to Gainesville. This afternoon started out with sorting the bones from non-bone for the last couple of bags of the > 1/4" chunky matrix pieces from sandbags collected at the Montbrook site in 2017. Now they can start screen-washing 2018...and then 2019...and maybe someday get caught-up to the present. In some of my first 1/4" matrix bags, sorting the complete bones (to be cataloged) from the scrappy broken bones, I had missed identifying a dentary (lower jaw) piece of the very common slider turtle (Trachemys inflata) and while pieces of the shell (carapace and plastron) are ubiquitous at this site cranial bones are much more rare. Armed with a new search image for this bone I was able to keep my eyes peeled and recognize it not mistaking it for a broken fish skull bone this time. The first bag provided me with first the left dentary and then the matching right dentary split into two pieces along the symphysis (mid-line). I wasn't going to allow these to slip through my fingers again. Turtles have no teeth so they have rather edentate (toothless) dentaries. They just have a rather sharp ridge along the top edge instead of individual teeth. When I got to the second bag I spotted an even nicer specimen complete across the symphysis with both halves connected. That bag also produced a really nice alligator claw core (ungual). Having finished sorting the last of the chunky matrix bags from 2017 I moved on to picking through some bone bags from March of 2019. This bag had several smaller bags with associated fragments that were bagged separately in the field by the collector to keep them from getting disassociated. The first small bag had the end of a gator bone with the articulating end broken off as it was poorly mineralized. It didn't take too long to orient the end piece and smaller chip to restore this to as good as it will get. Isolated slider turtle bones (Trachemys inflata) have to be virtually complete to make the collection as the Montbook site (and now the FLMNH collection) are chocked full of them. Gator bones are not as common and so even an identifiable gator bone with one reasonably complete articulating surface are still of interest for the collection. There is a layer at the Montbrook site that we call the "Turtle Death Layer" which is virtually paved with Trachemys shells. If we ever discover a similar "Alligator Graveyard Layer" with an embarrassing abundance of gator bones we may grow more choosy but for now we take what we can get. The next little bag of associated fragments turned out to be fragments of the Xiphiplastron and articulating Hypoplastron from the left side of the bottom part of the shell (plastron) of the slider turtle (Trachemys inflata). While I started with quite the bag of puzzle pieces, the individual fragments started lining up. Armed with a very VERY slowly growing knowledge of this part of the turtle's anatomy (having seen a few of these already) I'm beginning to recognize where the various bits should be going. Before long all of the two fragmented bones had been Frankensteined together as best as could be from the pieces. I ended up with virtually the complete left Xiphiplastron and Hypoplastron and the few remaining bits that were bagged in the field turned out not to be from these bones and were mixed in with the rest of the bones from this batch to see if they might connect to some other bone. This last bag of bones I was sorting through this evening turned up an odd bone that I couldn't place (not that my knowledge of fossil bones even scratches the surface of what there is to know). It had some characteristics of a vertebra but it was not symmetrical in any way and it seemed to be a complete (unbroken) bone so it had me confused. At this point it was only Richard Hulbert (the vertebrate paleontology collections manager) and me left at the warehouse--the few other students had gone home around 5pm and I was still trying to finish up this bag so I could put things away and go home for dinner as well. I showed the bone to Richard and told him I had failed to make the bone a vert since clearly it was not and asked him what the heck it was as I'd not seen anything like it before. (There are still so many many bones I'm unfamiliar with so this is not at all surprising.) He looked at it and his eyes quickly widened as he pronounced that it was a carnivore bone. Carnivores are relatively rare in most ecosystems and are likewise rare in the specimens found at fossil sites--other than places like the ancient tar pit site called La Brea ("tar" in Spanish) in downtown Los Angeles which is noteworthy for the many Saber-toothed Cats (Smilodon californicus) found there. And saber-tooth cats proved to be the key to this strange bone. A few years back at the Montbrook site an ancestor was discovered to the large and and fierce predatory cat with incisors that were indeed saber (or at least dagger) shaped. This cat was a formidable predator but its incisors had not yet evolved into the very distinctive dentition of its descendant. The Small Saber-toothed Cat (Rhizosmilodon fiteae) is known from this site from the initial partial skull that was found in 2017 and several additional bones that have turned up over the years including a femur and several wrist and finger bones. https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/news-saber-tooth-cat-skull-find-in-montbrook/ Richard and I located the cabinet and the particular drawer containing the collection of bones for this species and the preservation coloration of this mystery bone was clearly very similar to the other bones already cataloged. Additionally, we checked the collection label and the grid coordinates indicated it was found right at the epicenter of where the other bones were recovered so it was another clue that our hunch was looking promising. We compared it to the existing Small Saber-tooth Cat wrist bones but weren't finding a match. We went back to another cabinet in the back of the warehouse where the comparative material is stored and pulled out a drawer with a disarticulated modern skeleton of a Florida Bobcat (Lynx rufus). We looked through the box that contained the complete set of wrist bones for this cat species and none of them looked a match for the mystery bone. After consulting some osteology books with drawings of cat wrist bones we still weren't finding a match and so Richard figured he'd have to take the specimen back to his office at Dickinson Hall on campus and consult additional books and collections to get an ID on this bone though he was sure it was felid. We went back to look at the drawer where the Montbrook saber-tooth was stored and found a small bone from a second smaller species of cat that was found at the site and it was a match for the shape of our mystery bone--not a wrist bone but an ankle bone known as the ectocuneiform. We then went back to the drawer with the modern bobcat and looked through the box with the foot bones in it and found the matching (but much smaller) bone from this species and the articulating third metatarsal (toe bone) for comparison. This confirmed that we had the first recorded ectocuneiform for the saber-tooth from the Montbrook site. It is difficult (likely impossible) to find a good diagram of saber-tooth cat foot bones so here is a much more readily available human foot bone with the cuneiform bones labeled. The Medial cuneiform bone (aka entocuneiform or "inner" cuneiform) is attached to the first (big) toe bones counting from the mid-line of the body. The Intermediate cuneiform bone (aka mesocuneiform or "middle" cuneiform) is next connected to the second toe bones. The Lateral cuneiform bone (aka ectocuneiform or "outer" cuneiform) connects to the third (middle) toe bones. Oddly, there are no additional cuneiform bones and the last two sets of toe bones articulate with a bone called the Cuboid is not surprisingly the most cube-shaped of the foot bones. Always fun to learn something new each day at the warehouse. This bone had been dug up by another volunteer and had been sitting in a bone bag for over 3 years till that bag's contents were recently retrieved from storage, rinsed, dried, and re-bagged awaiting another volunteer to pick through the bag to see if any interesting specimens were hiding within that needed to be cataloged. In this particular case that volunteer was me and the specimen was an exciting one and an important one for the collection. It won't be cataloged with my name associated with it in any way but I'm happy to have been fortunate enough to have played a minor role in seeing it make its way safely into the proper drawer with the other associated bones from this particular Small Saber-toothed Cat. Cheers. -Ken

*Just a note that this is a follow-up post to the VFOTM post that I wanted to share.* After reading a few posts here on the forum I decided I’d go to the NSR when I got the chance. I’d read it was good for beginners and the opportunity presented itself in April, 2020. I decided I’d make the trip and see what I could find. The first trip I hunted I found very little and walked a great deal until the very end of the day when I finally found two small mosasaur teeth. One of which was a Globidens sp. I was instantly hooked. Two weeks later, on my second ever fossil hunting trip I spotted the exposed section of the tip of the dentary which was only an inch above the marl, and kept walking thinking that it was just wood sticking out of the riverbed. Keep in mind it was after a two hour drive and seven hour hike, I hadn’t read much about fossils, and had no idea about how to properly collect a more complete vertebrate. I continued walking and my exhausted heat addled brain finally processed that the chances of there being an old black piece of wood stuck in the bottom of the riverbed wasn’t that likely. So I walked a few yards back and was lucky enough to find it. Beginners luck! I didn’t take a picture of it until I exposed the first tooth. First picture though is just the anatomy of my find as I understand it. This was the first picture I did take of the right dentary. The NSR can rise pretty fast, especially when it’s raining out west and it was slowly rising so my find started going under water. I was stuck between trying to get it exposed and out of the ground in as best shape as possible and risking it going under which I didn’t know how would effect it. To top it all off the only tool I had was a screwdriver. Here is the dentary nearly exposed. And exposed. I dug a little channel that diverted some of the water away, but it was only effective for a few minutes. And here’s the shape it left in the river bottom. By the time I had the find out of the ground the water level was well over the site and the sun was going down. I decided I'd go back as soon as possible to see if I could find any more.

This 215 m.y. old dentary was only 2 cm long, but it tells a big story in early mammalian evolution. https://phys.org/news/2020-10-tiny-jaw-greenland-complex-teeth.html

I've got five jaw fragments from the Kem Kem of which I think they are from crocodilians. Any ideas as to what genus or species these belong would be appriciated. 1. No idea what this jaw is from, but my best guess is some crocodilian. 2. I also don't know what this is but also probably some crocodilian. 3. This one has a hard layer of sediment covering it and it's missing the underside of the jaw. It looks a bit like the dented part of a Spinosaurus dentary but it's more likely also crocodilian. 4. Definitely crocodilian, has a typical croc texture (lots of dents). To me it looks like a right jugal with a part of the maxilla. 5. Also some crocodilian, resembles an Elosuchus jaw but it's pretty small so maybe a juvenile or some other croc. Have fun ID'ing!

Recently i purchased this lower pterosaur jaw fragment (23cm in length) and i have been paying it off bit by bit (currently on hold). The seller claims absolutely no work has been done to it though it looks like there has been a repaired crack about one third down the jaw. I wanted to ask whether anyone can see if there has been any work done to it that isn't listed or that i haven't spotted. To me it looks good and looks mostly natural (except maybe the repaired crack). I don't have the fossil yet so i hope the pictures are enough. Thanks in advance.

So I got gobs of turtle stuff as many of us Floridians have and there were all kinds of these guys crawling and swimming around here. I was wondering if any of you have run across complete turtle/tortoise jaw/dentary's and might confirm these fragments might be. So here are 3 fragments that have interesting textures. All 3 have a gentle curve/arch/narrowing to them. 1) seems to have a porosity/pitting very similar to alligator or croc and I'm not sure if that immediately excludes it as part of a turtle jaw.