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Out hunting yesterday and just declined an invitation for Tomorrow because my son is visiting and we are likely to hunt both Wednesday and Friday. I just can not take the wear and tear as often anymore. This was a prospecting trip for new locations. Basically we go to a place we have not been and then "walk" the river until we find gravel and then probe the gravel for depth and fossils. Many times the gravel is only on the surface or too small or does not contain fossils. Then we move on again and again until we find a place that does... or we just have a nice walk in the River in the Sunshine.. I did not find lots of fossils but did enjoy the ones I found... At the 2nd spot we had 4 inches of mud, gravel and mussels in equal proportions. 1st sieve had a nice Nuchal osteoderm. Dug for 5-6 sieves, found a deer tine but nothing else... moved on... We stopped at 2 places with lots of gravel but almost nothing in them.. just a few very small shark teeth , some broken... This was not what I would call super_successful but we were 3 hours into a 5 hour hunt... So we moved downstream.. We always go downstream... it is easier than fighting the current on a long day... We got to an area that had tightly packed gravel and not the normal darkness of Peace River gravel. Light brown and cream colored gravel on a bed of clay. MIOCENE !!! We are about to find small shark teeth with colored blades and tan or cream roots... In the 1st sieve , there it was.... Be nice if the tip was complete , but definitely what I am looking for... Feels fantastic. Not only did we find a spot to come back to (Steve found more that I did, especially small colorful teeth), the prospecting trip was successful AND we had 2 hours to dig like maniacs and figure out what this spot could produce. Today I spent most of the day cleaning off the table on my side porch that contained the finds of 4-5 previous trips , and processing the finds from yesterday. Top Layer.. Silicified shells, sponges, Middle layer, Bone heavily fossilized and sometimes silicified, Bottom layer Shark teeth, best finds. I usually bring out 2-3 times as much but it gets processed out quickly. For example broken shark teeth go to my hunting partner, good shark teeth donated to schools and clubs, best shark teeth go to my daughter... She makes jewelry and collages. Note the Blue Blades ,, Miocene... just like we get out of the Phosphate Mines.. So the notables... From the Pleistocene a turtle Nuchal and a Llama upper molar.. plus a Juvenile Equus Incisor Seems I recall that an Equus Incisor with a shorter length of enamel are deciduous .. maybe /maybe not.. What about that , Jp ? Botryoidal "grapes" with little sprinkles of Druzy growing inside a silicified oyster... Then the prizes and why I think spots like this are more "Miocene" that other sections in the River.. These are quite rare for me... Then a very small Dolphin Tooth !!! Obviously requires some level of salt water. Never identified in Florida with this rugosity of enamel... I would be happy if someone would identify any dolphin of this size with rugose enamel anywhere in the world... I have no examples. Finally , I did not recognize this laying in the sieve... It also changed color as it dried... I have never found an Eagle Ray tooth of this size or this perfection Enjoy...

When I am about to make a post about finds, I am always conflicted on choosing "Hunting Trips", where I share lots of known fossils or "Fossil ID"... where I really want identification assistance. Usually works out If I put them together. It feels like I have been struggling to get out. With the Holidays , I managed to get out 4 times in December , 5 times in January , and yesterday was my 1st day in February. I used to be able to get out 10 times a month... those are my really happy days... I went yesterday and will go to the Peace river tomorrow.. YES !!! Started slow, but yesterday was a very successful hunt... Here are the ones I think I know. The Highlight of the day are 3 fossils from Hemiauchenia macrocephala. Two carpals in the same sieve and in fantastic shape. This was a favorite location and thus I had hunted frequently. Usually that depletes an area. In my 1st 8 sieves, I had found small shark, ray teeth plus lots of turtle and many broken bones. In the 9th sieve , BOTH of these carpals showed up and I put away any thoughts of moving on. Very rare, This is my 2nd or 3rd of these. A camel_llama lower premolar in great shape, with a little damage on the chewing surface. In the screen with the Llama tooth, a good sized Hemipistis upper tooth In previous threads, I have been discussing half fossilized vines, I found 2 fully fossilized Liana vines. Learn about liana vines, thick, woody vines that grow in the rainforest and compete with other plant forms for light and space. I found a number of Horse teeth, but I really worked on photos and trying to Identify this fragment of a tooth I thought might be cat... it is not. Staring at the broken enamel, I realized that I had Hunter _ Schreger bands... and cats do not have HSBs Found a nice Equus Lower tooth. Horses have one sets of teeth that they chew down over a lifetime. The length would say this was a young adult at death. Not everything is perfect and I do love Tridactyl horse teeth.. Almost there, chipped a little on the right side. Now for a few unknowns...Alligator ??? I did not realize that these "holes" existed any where else than as part of an Alligator osteoderm and thought that's the strangest osteoderm I have ever seen.. Additional pictures... Jaw ?? Please confirm what part of the Alligator this bone comes from.... Here is another find that kept me from filling the sieve... My first thought was Bone, but it was fossilized and heavy like rock, so I started rolling it in my hand to form an opinion. Saw some shiny stuff on 2nd view This 3rd view stopped me. Straight lines in Bones are unusual... It usually implies petrified wood ( go see the vine above) Let me look at the 2nd view more closely.. It looks like layers... maybe tusk... Enhance that a little, layers that get into compacted layers, and I can almost see the Schreger bands going horizontally and then crossing with bands going upwards at a 45 degree angle. Can this be ivory??? You can see the delusions that may happen when my focus should be to fill the sieve and find more fossils... I did find more, but you have seen the good ones.... Enjoy...

Up at 5 am, out hunting today, Valentine's day in the US. It was a short day hunting (3 hours to get to the site, 4 hours hunting, 3 hours to get back home). My wife Barbara and I always have a special dinner... Ribeye Steaks, scalloped potatoes, string beans and a desert from Norman Love. Today it was a Chocolate Bomb. Bittersweet chocolate, Milk chocolate wafer, Dark and Milk Chocolate Mousse. It was quite impressive. We split one. Back to Interesting fossil finds.. Here is all I found in the 4 hours. I do not have time tonight to focus on every fossil, but there are a couple I would like you to see before I go to sleep. The larger Astragali... I think it is likely Hemiauchenia. I have found fossils of both Pliocene species , macrocephala and gracilis at this site. @Harry Pristis will certainly know if it is Lamine, Here is a picture from his gallery. A large astragali!! My right astragali length is only 53 mm. I wonder if it is gracilis. I do not have one of those. 2nd Interesting fossil imbedded in matrix.. Looks easy but ... If this is an Alligator tooth with most of it's root, that would rare. Most of my Alligator teeth a just the enamel, with the root long gone. However, take a close look at that enamel... What is that rugosity on the enamel? and are those tiny serrations on the carina? This could mess up my ideas of differentiating factors between Alligator and Crocodile... @pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon @HunterLacrosse

“Tiny Bones Project” So these little perissodactal and artiodactal carpals and tarsals are a tricky bunch to navigate. I'm only dealing with 5-6 species so far and it’s already bonkers. As such making a thread dedicated to the ID’s of some more common fossil finds seemed worth making. Especially since this project involves making a “touch Catalog” and photo library of them for me to use in future ID’s. Why not share the information? Lord knows I’m getting plenty from y’all! When the results of a group are completed, and have been reviewed by the forum, I’ll post the final revised report and photos here. My idea for this thread is to compile the various existing photo examples of these bones from TFF and the new photos of these bones from my collection. Once my stash is exhausted I’ll hunt for others to study and if TFF members have examples I don’t they can post what they want to add and share too. Finding “exploded” joint images to study these bones individually online proved unsuccessful. Most studies are interested in the articulated version of these groups. So searching for individual bone examples leads you right back to our own Harry and his incredible image galleries. Hopefully I can merge new stock photos with Harry’s confirmed gallery images and also include the bone images often presented for ID that Harry’s galleries are used to authenticate. Harry's post show up in Google because his galleries are used to ID so many things. We search specific things so we just end up back at Harry after a few clicks. If TFF is the end location for identification of carpals and tarsals let’s collaborate the efforts into one powerhouse of an ID catalog. This project got its start because I have been looking for random carpal and tarsal fossils for an Equus sp lower limb articulation project. I quickly learned getting positive ID’s when trying to purchase these types of fossil are not common. Most are listed generically or even incorrectly. So I figured I’d document the hunt to look back on later. The Equus project needed a single bone from a large auction lot of mixed fossils. After a good bit of rationalization I realized buying 50 bones to get 1 was a little silly. However, I had roughly ID’d several “shapes” of scaphoid bones which got me interested. Then I realized I had multiple versions of the same bones in various stages of erosion and that’s when the idea light came on. “Buy them all and learn from it!” So the main goal is identifying, labeling and photographing. With attention added to photos that can show multiple erosion level examples together. Gonna take a bit but that’s why I have lots of projects. Little here. Little there. And every now and then I’ll upload a new group for review. Im learning so be patient! If I use a word incorrectly or need revision it’s ok! Just tell me and I will happily increase my brain mass and correct the thread. It does need to be cohesive and I will need assistance with. Keep the faith and try to do good! Jp Disclaimer: Do not watch this video with and kind of beverage in your mouth as my pronunciation of these words is most likely laughable 😊. I also called the camel unciforms, pisiforms and had already cleaned up before I realized it. Pisi about that blunder to say the least. 😉 FullSizeRender.MOV

I posted a thread discussing finding barnacles and seashells in the Peace River on Monday. I did have a few other finds and decided to post these separately... 1st -- a very small tooth that looks like deer but I do not think it is, and if it is not deer and in the Peace river it is very rare. Back in February, @Harry Pristis identified another small tooth I had found that was from a Pliocene deer, Eocolieus gentryorum... and it looks very similar, just a little smaller, but I need one more photo, I do not think this is Deer, I think it is Llama, and the only llama I can think of at this size is Hemiauchenia gracilis... Let's see what Harry says... 2nd up is a pretty small Dolphin tooth... I was digging in pea gravel,, small gravel generally leads to small fossils. A marine mammal periotic. Usually these are 30 mm, not 20 . I will be curious what @Boesse identifies it as.... When not hunting, I have been working most of the days, cleaning up and cleaning out my collection... NOT ENOUGH ROOM... While sorting the ones to keep, I found this in a ziplok bag from years ago.. It is about the same size and looks a little similar but did not come from the Peace River.. curious that I should come across these two 24 hours apart...

As some note, I am trying to identify mammal ear bones found in SW Florida (and hopefully other Southeast US locations. In this case, Camelids. Hopefully with assistance from @Plantguy and @Harry Pristis I found this single photo on Worthpoint, probably put there by Nate. identified as Hemiauchenia. On August 23rd, 2009 while searching at Quality Aggregate Pit in North Fort Myers, I found this land find. It's length is quite large just under 3 inches. I have come to believe that it comes from either Hemiauchenia or Mirifica, the 2 fossil camelids in the Florida Pleistocene record. To me , it is much larger and different from any of the many Equus earbones that I have found. Frankly, I am seeking other mammal earbones that might be camelid. I am interested in all fossil mammal earbones. However , to maintain clarity, if they are obviously not similar in shape and size, please open a new Fossil ID thread for them. For some reason, these camelid earbones seem more rare that their astragalus, calcaneum, or carpals/tarsals. i my hunting areas.

I am hoping for confirmation from one of our Peace River, FL experts on a bone I picked up last week. I am always looking for new land mammal finds (at least new to me) and I think I have one here. After several hours on line and looking through Kocisis' Vertebrate Fossils guide I believe I have nailed this down as a seismoid, lateral malleolar of Hemiauchenia macrocephala. The protruding "point" is quite distinctive. The specimen measures 35mm Long x 17 mm Wide x 28 mm tall. Input from anyone who believes they can confirm the ID would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I found something new (to me) in differentiating the two most common (Hemiauchenia macrocephala and Palaeolama mirifica) Llama/Camels in the Florida fossil record and decided to share. One differentiating factors is the presense of crenulations (Palaeolama mirifica) or lack of crenulations (Hemiauchenia macrocephala) A couple of month back I found what I believed to be a Hemiauchenia macrocephala lower left m3 molar. Note the relatively narrow enamel height. Lots of root, less enamel than I expected. Bother by this difference in enamel height, I wondered if this was a old senile tooth worn down to the roots; I started to wonder of it might be a lower p3 rather than an m3, I wondered if it might be an upper M3... Then I came across a very extensive description of Hemiauchenia macrocephala on the website for the University of Florida Museum of Natural History and found this Hemiauchenia macrocephala lower left m3. and this caption.. So that is the identification tip for Florida fossil hunters who like me did not know that on some Hemiauchenia macrocephala teeth there is a layer of cementum covering some of the enamel making it look shorter, and that same effect can not occur on Palaeolama mirifica molars.

Hi!! I found these lower teeth from a possible member of the Camelidae in Coahuila, México (northern Mexico). They could help me if it is from a Llama (Lama, Hemiauchenia) or a camel (Camelops, Megatylopus, Gigantocamelus)

A collector/dealer recently donated to our museum a small collection of Pleistocene vertebrate fossils (mostly mammalian) from Florida. Only a few items were labelled, and he could not recall any provenance for some of the material. Even though the material was poorly provenanced, it will make a welcome addition to our comparative collection of Pleistocene vertebrates. Can anyone help me with the provenance for the llama/camel (cf. Hemiauchenia) calcaneum in this phone-camera snapshot? I thought the attached oyster shells might help in narrowing down the possibilities. I was given a verbal location for this specimen (there was no label), but I am skeptical. Thank you!

Hunting between thunderstorms and deeper water. During the rest of the season, I note those places where I am finding fossils but have low water conditions...because of lower back issues, I generally refuse to hunt where I must bend over the screen. However, I do remember where such spots exist for days like today. An excellent day, some unusual, finds, a couple of megs, and then these: A odd bone, I have not previously found, but believe to be an Equus Splint bone: Another interesting fossil which I think most likely a large Sloth dermal scute. Finally, my best find of the day, a piece of jaw with a Hemiauchenia m3 molar in nice cream - brown colors.. These are really nice finds... but I was cherishing the end days of the 2017-2018 season with a friend on a day with sunshine in the morning and rain clouds later in the day. Does not get better than this... Jack