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Hello all. These two bones were found this morning. I think they are both femurs but I’m usually wrong. I squally find deer bone so that’s my starting point. The larger bone is 9.5 inches and the smaller 7.25 inches. The larger one is pretty heavy. I am also working on the assumption that they are modern. Can someone identify the animal? Thank you

good morning is there a need to preserve modern bone? and if so, can you suggest a safe and (relatively) easy way to do so? i'm hoping there may be some kind of aerosol spray or perhaps something i can just brush on i don't have the equipment or space to use acetone and paraloid (and am hoping that would not be necessary for modern bone) thank you

Hey all, here’s another deer jaw that I’m wondering if it’s a fossil or modern, I know it’s difficult to know if it’s modern or a fossil cause deer are still around but I’d really appreciate if you could give some insight! @Harry Pristis @Fossildude19 @digit @Bone Daddy @ShellseekerTIA

Found in big brook. I am guessing tiger shark from the stripes Hoping it’s a fossil but suspect rather modern. Your help appreciated

hello apologies if this is in the wrong category and thank you in advance i read somewhere here that there was an alternative to the burn test to determine fossil v modern it was some kind of liquid solution if i am correct could someone please post/repost it? thanks again

Pushing my luck with a 2nd request today. This from my huge assortment of “maybes”. 7/8 of an inch. Very triangular piece as I hope is shown in the photos. Bone? Fossil or modern? Of what? And I understand those are likely difficult questions based on a small fragment. Thank you in advance on any help you can give me

Hello all last trip to big brook was great. Found a lot of small shark teeth and more. On my way out in a hurray I picked this up, forgot about it and stumbled on it today. 3 inches long and the texture sure looks like bone. But I am a newbie and was hoping for confirmation. I assume it’s way too small to guess from what (but if you can guess please do). Major question is whether this is a fossil or modern. Any clues from the photos? Have never done a burn test but am ready to try. Sorry to say but it feels light not heavy tjank you

I came across these in central North Dakota while looking for Teredo wood I assume they are modern buffalo teeth, but when I took a blowtorch to the root, it didn't have much of a burn smell. some of the small bits of root eventually blackened. This isn't so much an identification problem as a question- but confirmation of buffalo is fine, and if I am wrong, correction to the correct animal is welcome. Question: in the process of "fossilization", as collagen or whatever is replaced by minerals, how can you age a specimen, modern vs 'fossil' vs partially 'fossilized'

I keep finding deer bone but this one looks too short and too thick any ideas? thank you

Hi, Even in this hard times of corona virus outbreak I couldn't resist the urge to visit again a cave that I found a few weeks ago, but couldn't explore it fully. So I went again and this last time I went in the cave I found a great number of bones scattered around the cave. I think they are probably modern, but it is weird because the cave isn't very easily accessible for animals since it has a few big drops. I found this tooth in a small ,,room,, which was barely big enough to squeeze in to. In that same place there were a small broken skull and many bones, but this is just one of the many places with such bones. At first I even thought that some explorers ate a chicken or something like that in there, but the bones are just too many and THIS WOULD HAVE BEEN A CHICKEN SLAUGHTER FEST. I would be glad to hear your opinions on what creature is this toot from and if it is modern or ancient. The color I guess would suggest modern but i am no expert on how are bones preserved in caves and sadly I have no information on the age of the cave. I hope you are all fine and the virus never gets to you!

So..............going through my fossils I've had for decades, and just wanted to know if these two horse teeth are modern or "ice age" fossils. Both very heavy, creek finds in Kansas City and both have identical cusps. Thoughts appreciated! Bone

For those of us that love to collect sharks teeth this is probably not the way we want to find our great white teeth. :-) https://www.foxnews.com/great-outdoors/great-white-shark-bites-into-scuba-divers-kayak-loses-2-teeth

Hi everyone this is my first post so I'm sorry if I'm doing this wrong. I need some help identifying this shark jaw. I bought it packaged at a gift shop a long time ago so I don't know where it comes from and I don't think it was from that area. The upper jaw has 20 teeth on each side and the lower has 18. The last 5 or 6 teeth on the bottom don't seem to have a point. The edges don't have serrations and I don't see any cusps. Thank you all for any help!

NJ Cretaceous streams, found a few of these over my time, just not sure what they are. Any advice? Sorry for crappy pics, if its an issue and a piece that's nto easily determinable I will take more exact close ups. Thanks all!

I found this bone in a ditch with no teeth marks or chewing on it. Obviously I believe this is modern as it still smelled of death and decay (I ran it under soap and boiling water and then rubbed it with sanitizer. and even then I don't touch it without a napkin) I was curious if my hypothesis was correct about this being a deer femur bone? I wasn't sure because I'm no bone expert but maybe someone here knows, all I know is we have deer, bears, cougars and possibly elk or moose but that would be rare. This was found in a creek by Murdock beach Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula (temperate rain forest conditions near large ocean.)

I found this tooth is Somerset, it is probably modern, does anyone know what it is?

I found this bone on a Tampa Bay Beach, Florida and the next week I found an identical one but left it. When I first scooped it out of the water I thought it was a molar from a manatee. After looking at it I saw it didn't have a root and was it a joint bone? From the weight and color I think it's modern but curious to find out what I found and what animal. (ruler is in inches) Any help or ideas welcome and appreciated.

Just curious what this bone might be. It's not a fossil but wondering what the bone experts think... deer or something else?

Recently re discovered a bunch of these things that we got from the Canary Islands. They were all washed up on the beaches and they do not look stricktly geological to me and looks kind of like some kind of modern calcified organism or trace of one. I stumbled upon a book at some point, I believe it was called Darwin's Fossils that said these were some kind of remains of algae that have fossilized, but when I looked that up there was no evidence I could find supporting this claim, maybe someone else knows what these things could be? Any new insight is appreciated, Thank you.

I picked up this Wild boar (Sus scrofa) jaw section from Florida recently. While it not recognized in the Florida fossil record due to the boar being an introduced species in the past 600 years or so years. This piece has heavy patina, and is mineralized but is too young to be a fossil as it is thought to be a peice that is 400-500 years old. I have Mastodon and cave bear material that are older and far less mineralized. Other than using the rough date of 11k years ago, how else do I explain why a younger less mineralized peice is not a fossil while an older less mineralized peice is a fossil? Thoughts?

Ok as if the clam wasn’t enough excitement for the day, not that this is exciting I also found what I believe is a very old, but modern cow skeleton, which I believe is most likely fully articulated. I just want to confirm it is cow. I went fossil hunting yesterday, which was almost a complete and total bust for me. Rarely happens, but that was the case fossil wise. However that does not mean I didn’t find some really cool, very, very cool, want so badly kind of stuff, but I couldn’t carry them out because they were too big and heavy. Anyway, it was miserably hot. I believe I found the hardest, most difficult, poison ivy overgrown path I could possibly find into the creek. First attempt was a 25 foot drop straight down into the creek. I scouted a small section of the creek out, found lots of very cool stuff, but only a coupe of oysters and that was it fossil wise. I was hot and wanted to check out another place before dark so I looked for an easier way out. I found one I thought I could manage. Problem was I was in my flip flops. I had no traction. If I’d been in my boots I’d had no problem at that spot. I couldn’t make it so I went further up creek. The creek water was like warm bath water and offered no relief from the heat. I came to a spot in the creek where a pool of water was divided off from the sandbar. I stepped into it and too my surprise the water was cool and sooooo refreshing. I splashed it all over myself to cool down and walked on. I walked maybe 10 feet and saw this on the edge by the creek bank. It seemed to have recently fallen about 4.5 feet from the middle of the creek bank above. There was a large clump of bank to the right that had more bone in it. I have to mention that I was a few hundred yards from a cemetery so it gave me pause. I had to process it a moment and determine that these were not human bones. Wouldn’t that be horrible! The cemetery could be 100 yrs old. The creek changes course over the years and encroaches upon the cemetery and graves start washing out into the creek!! Yikes! I’m sure it must have happened somewhere once upon a time. Didn’t happen here though. Moving on. This was embedded in the bank about 4.5 feet from the portion of the creek I was standing on and about 5 feet down from the top of the bank. No way it could have been redeposited since it seems largely articulated. I’d been seeing concretions in the bank of the creek so initially I thought the ball to the right was a stone. I was taking a pic of the broken bone. Rib maybe? The ball and one above it I think are heads of femur or something. Here is the bank. You can’t really see the other bones in the bank in this pic. They are there though. Bad quality pic, but I removed some of the dirt from the bank to expose the bone. There is more bone to the right and left. Some of the bones that had fallen from bank. A vertebra Anyway, do you think it is cow or could it be bison? That’s about all the pics I have. It’s modern, but I’m curious. I am assuming the cow must have gotten stuck in the mud and died. The cool water in the creek had to be coming from an underground spring. This was maybe 10 feet from there. Maybe it made the soil very soft and contributed the the bovid’s demise. I have come across cow skeletons on numerous occasions that died in a field and are completely disarticulated from wild animals scavenging them. That didn’t happen here. It must have been mud or something.

I have a friend that brought this chunk of coral from the Dominican republic and said that it washed out of a cliff face and he picked it up afterwards. I really do not see any signs of it being a fossil and believe that it is probably modern. What do you think? Thank you in advance.

Hi guys! I just uploaded a gallery of modern Carcharhinus upper dentitions: . The images are from my master's thesis (Smith 2015), the full text is available at (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316735477_Species_discrimination_in_Carcharhinus_shark_teeth_using_elliptic_Fourier_analysis). Unfortunately, due to file size limitations, the images in the paper are not really good enough for detailed analysis of the morphology. So I have uploaded them individually here. I personally extracted the teeth from almost all of these jaws...If I remember correctly, they were soaked in isopropyl alcohol for several days and then the teeth removed with toothpicks and/or just pulling them out with my fingers. I cut up my fingers too many times to count trying to get these suckers out! Only the upper dentition is included; the bottom teeth in Carcharhinus are very same-y so we just focused on the uppers. Keep in mind, these represent only twelve species out of over thirty described species. They are biased towards species today present in the Western Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico. Five species now present in the Western Atlantic/Gulf of Mexico were not included due to lack of specimens/time: C. altimus, C. galapagensis, C. perezi, C. porosus, and C. signatus. Other Carcharhinus dentitions are available on the net. J-elasmo has some, I believe mostly collected from near Japan: http://naka.na.coocan.jp/JAWCarcharhinidae.html. They generally match well with my dentitions, although their Silky (C. falciformis) dentition is more coarsely serrated at the tips than mine, and the lateral notch, which is prominent in my specimens, is basically absent in the J-elasmo dentition. And of course there is Elasmo.com, a great resource for all sharks, not just Carcharhinus. Their C. falciformis dentition is similar to mine, so I don't know what's going on with J-elasmo's dentition, either it's mislabeled or Silky teeth look a lot different in the western Pacific. Or it's just an unusual specimen. And of course there are a bunch of papers online with Carcharhinus teeth, although these are generally isolated fossil teeth. The single best resource I could find for Carcharhinus identication based on teeth is unfortunately difficult to obtain, and would probably require an interlibrary loan request: Garrick, J. A. F. (1982). Sharks of the genus Carcharhinus. US Dep. Commer. NOAA Tech. Rep. NMFS Circular, 445, 194. His shark teeth images are illustrations, but well done, and with a lot of descriptive information. Purdy et al. (2001) is also a good reference:(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284595551_The_Neogene_sharks_rays_and_bony_fishes_from_Lee_Creek_Mine_Aurora_North_Carolina). You can find references to several papers related to fossil Carcharhinus, as well as a general overview of their fossil record, in my thesis. Finally, I'm attaching a figure from my thesis, illustrating the morphological terminology used: C. falciformis, upper right jaw, 5th position from symphysis. Feel free to add additional references or information about the genus Carcharhinus. Or if anything is incorrect in this post. The subject of fossil Carcharhinus tooth identification comes up fairly regularly in the forums, so let's try and stick as much information in here as possible!