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Having returned from a lovely vacation to Florida, I have examined some fossils that were brought back with me. There are always unknowns in my collection , but year by year I require less and less assistance in IDing finds!!! This year, I am down to these five: 1. A large bone with odd joint surfaces. Not sure of the owner and not sure what bone I am looking at! 2. A tooth that was fractured. Gator? The reason for thinking of the ridge running down the tooth in the first picture. The 2nd pic is of the fractured surface. 3. Odd looking bone. Again the owner of this bone and location of it eludes me. Navicular bone from some form of horse??? 4. Turtle foot pad? Initially I thought it was just a rock, but then I noticed the crease in the upper part of the first picture. 5. This one has me totally stumped. Texture of bone but looks like a molar with roots and a depression on the opposite side. Maybe nothing.

This was found in the Peace River in Central Florida.

Went to the Peace River yesterday to beat the cold front and rain for a very pleasant 85 degree day of digging with friends. My streak of poor performance continues but I found one item I thought might be of interest. First, the take for the day: Now in December of 2016 I found a small meg tooth that @MarcoSr identified as a meg symphyseal tooth, which Tony @ynot picked up at auction. This little tooth looks quite similar to me, but has a somewhat shorter blade. Is it another symphyseal tooth, or just an ordinary posterior? I may need to get a better picture of it.

I had the privilege of a day on the water with JCBShark and Shellseeker. When I found this bone, they both thought modern. It sounds fossil like when I hit it against something hard but the flame test showed that at best it is old, in that a slight but definite smell permeated the air when put against a flame. Whether a "young" fossil or modern, I still want to try and ID this. The prominent ball just stands out to me as being different. The lesser trochanter is fractured off.

Picked this up Wednesday on my last visit to the Peace River. I was prospecting on some new sites and having modest success with small shark teeth and turtle shell pieces when I pulled up my first complete dolphin/porpoise periotic. In the next sifting screen I found the below specimen. I thought it could be a partial axis vert of some type but am not sure it is anything more than a suggestively shaped rock. Any input on what it may be would be appreciated.

Hello! A few weeks ago at the Peace River in Florida I met a couple of fine fellows who told me about this site. (Hi, guys whose names I've forgotten!) We were searching in the same creek, and while my friend and I found nothing more than small shark teeth and dugong ribs, of course they found a mammoth tooth just a little farther up the creek. But even though my finds don't tend to be spectacular, I love the hunt. My first love is mammals, but lately I've been getting into echinoids, corals, and other invertebrates. I'm a member of the Tampa Bay Fossil Club and the Southeastern Geological Society, and go to mines with them whenever I can. I promise I'll try not to ask questions I could answer myself with a little research! When I'm not fossil hunting I'm kayaking, paddleboarding, looking for snakes and bugs, and antiquing/thrifting for mid-century wood and plastic items. To support all that, I write novels. I'm glad to meet all of you, and would love to meet more people to go fossiling with!

Here are two small whale petrosals that I can't identify -- can I get some help? I am not certain, but I think they are different species. What do you think? @Boesse@Shellseeker

Found the below specimen in the Peace River recently. I have spent several hours looking at images of small fossil jaws, fossil fish jaws, etc. I haven't found anything that I could see as a match. I am now hoping someone may recognize this. The holes appear to have an interior channel running in between inside of the specimen. Lighting was a problem as I was taking the photos and these are the best I could do for now. Hope they are sufficient. Any input is appreciated, thanks.

Posted the below a few weeks ago with some other finds hoping to get some assistance with an ID. I think this could be the root of a mastodon or mammoth tooth. I am hoping for input from anyone who has an idea or experience with a similar find. Thanks for taking a look.

I believe the below specimen is a partial vertebra. But if so, of what? Or is it just too broken to ID? Any input would be appreciated, thanks!

I have been lucky to find pieces of an ivory tusk (mammoth or mastodon) in the Peace River approx. 2 weeks ago. I have taken some photos to show what it looked like when found, two after consolidating showing how some large pieces fit together and then photos of the many loose pieces. I will have a nice jigsaw puzzle to work on once I consolidate the remaining pieces. I am hoping for suggestions on what glue or adhesive to use to try and rebuild the tusk. I have researched options that included super glue, gorilla glue and other adhesives. Which is best and easiest to work with? Photo #1 - tusk when found Photo #2 - three largest pieces consolidated with acetone and vinac. Photo #3 = tusk pieces properly aligned . Photos #4 & #5 - puzzle pieces to be consolidated and used to rebuild the tusk as best I can I will post progression photos and the final product when done. Thanks for any help on the adhesive/glue question.

Found this bone in the Peace River early last week. I believed it to be a mammal toe bone or something similar. After hunting for comparisons here, on line and from texts I have on hand I believe it to be an Equus medial phalanx. The size in millimeters is approximately 40.1 X 40.3 x 23.5. I would appreciate any input confirming or pointing me in another direction. Thanks for taking a look!

Found this bone on the Peace River, FL today. I was searching a new spot when several pieces of ivory tusk were found and I could feel some large bone material under water but was having trouble bringing it up. When it finally surfaced I first thought - vertebrae - and I am still leaning that way. It is approximately 6 3/4" x 6 3/4" x 5 1/4" and heavy. Question is, if vertebra - from what? I would appreciate any input, opinions, comments. Thanks. Also found there today was a tapir molar, mastodon and mammoth tooth fragments, horse teeth and many shark teeth.

Hello! I know there are a lot of threads on the peace river.l, and I’ve spent about an hour reading through them and just want to ask a few question. Sorry if they may be repetitive. 2 years ago we went to Peace River with the amazing John from this forum. He was so helpful, kind and informative and we greatly appreciate him! We are coming down this week into next and would really love to go to the peace river again. I just had a few questions in case my husband and I venture alone. Is there a good time to best avoid gators? If we were not able to get a fossil license in time we can only collect shark teeth, correct? We were gifted last minute flights to see the in-laws. Would it be best to rent a kayak or just wade in areas and just dig a little deeper Or if someone is at the peace river anytime This Thursday to next Tuesday and doesn’t mind letting us come with , we would love to join and could help with any expense. I’m the treasurer with our local geology club in Michigan and can always verify my identity. Any other advice would be helpful! -Anna-Marie

Hi all! Im new to the forum and I have what seems to be some kind of mammal claw. It's almost exactly 1 inch long and I found it digging a creek near the peace river. Any idea what it is specifically? Also if this isn't the place to ask for ID help I do apologize. I didn't see any specific spot on the site to ask. Thanks guys

So I recently made a post showing some of the teeth I pulled from the Peace River over the holiday break at the end of 2019 ( link below ). I love Megalodon teeth with a passion. Like many other hunters, they are my goal when I go out fossil hunting. I have found though that river teeth are much more fragile and lighter than most land found teeth. I'm not sure if that is due to properties in the water. Maybe over time the rivers wash away some of the minerals in the teeth making them more fragile and worn down. Either way after my 3 day river hunt I was happy with the haul of Meg teeth that I had found but only 2 out of the 29 teeth I found made it to the keep pile. The rest hit the broken bin for later projects. Feeling dissatisfied with the quality of my finds I set out for one more day of hunting. Christmas day was perfect. The weather was nice and I had a new land site in mind that I wanted to explore. So I left early in the morning so that I could explore as much as possible for the whole day. After about an hour hike I came across this vein of rock that looked to be a layer of fossils. I mostly found worn down Dugong bones and fragments but I knew that meant Megalodon was not far behind. After about 20 minutes of searching this area I found my first tooth I have learned from hunting land sites how easy it is to stay in one spot once you find one tooth. You think "oh this area is so large I should stay here and hunt. If I found one, there are more here." But land sites I have found are not like the rivers. Fossils don't collect in one spot like they do in moving water. So I chose to explore more of the new area so that I wouldn't miss out on other finds. After 6 hours of finding nothing but one more broken meg and a few small teeth, I chose to loop back to my first and only good spot of the day to search it for one more hour before heading home. I chose to take my time in this spot and really look at the gravel and dirt. I had found one good tooth in this area so there must be others. However what I thought was an untouched area turned out to not be. While in my last hours of hunting time I spotted two other hunters staring at the ground just like me on the top of a hill. Little did they know I had already looked at the area they were searching. I lost some faith that I would find much in this area now knowing that other people already knew about this spot and were hitting it, however I still searched for a while. I think it's fair to say that when land hunting most fossil hunters including myself only surface collect. It's too hot and time consuming to dig in one spot looking for teeth. It's much better to let mother nature wash them from the sand and gravel as it rains. Seeing that this area had been hunted before I realized why I was not seeing many teeth on the surface of these gravel piles. Either way I used my last hour well, looking in the cracks and water run off areas in the hills where teeth would collect as they get washed out and then all of a sudden I spotted a very exciting looking rock poking out of the side wall of one of these erosion points. I dug around the rock and to my surprise and excitement it was exactly what I was hoping for. A fully intact and untouched Megalodon tooth. Out of all of my Bone Valley teeth I have only ever found one that I would consider almost perfect. It has all of the serrations and a fully intact root with a beautiful marbled grey and blue coloration. However like most Bone Valley teeth it has a tip ding. That is part of Bone Valley though since it was a baby Meg Nursery full of food to crunch their teeth on. So when this new tooth came out of the sand on Christmas day it was the perfect gift for all those hours out on the hunt. It is fully intact with only some small feeding damage on the top right side of the tooth, it even has the tip!! This tooth measures 4.25 inches, making it now my biggest and most complete tooth yet. I am so happy with this find. However it dried sort of dark greenish brown so I am thinking of setting it out in the sun to let it lighten up. The part that had been exposed to the sun is really nice and white so maybe more sun will bring out those nice colors. Let me know if you think that is a good idea or not. Here's a link to the river hunt I posted the other day.

Hello Fossil Forum, it has been a long time since I've been on here, but I managed to get back down to Florida for a couple weeks and went out to the Peace River twice. It's been almost 10 years since I dug the gravels and I had a blast. I have all sorts of fun stuff to look through, identify, and label. This bone is particularly puzzling to me. It seems pretty distinctive with the large elliptical/rounded articular facet and the planar facet on the opposite side. Without a comparative collection to look through, I haven't been able to pin it to anything. (I have a couple leads, but nothing convincing) Relevant Information: Peace River gravel beds, Florida Miocene-Pleistocene Possible Dimensions in photo. I wanted to make the photos more clear, so I sketched a rough version of each and color coded corresponding parts. I didn't place a key, because I don't have names for the corresponding parts. Thanks for taking a look Roddy

It had been a while since my last good fossil hunting trip so I was very excited to have free time over most of December. I had three free days the week before Christmas and I made use of everyone of them. The first day I went out with the goal of trying new areas that I had not tried before, so I spent most of day one trying new locations and coming up with only one good spot that produced some nice smaller teeth but nothing too amazing shark tooth wise. I did however find my first Tapir tooth but the root structure was missing. The next day out was spent mostly adventuring through other new areas with little luck except for right at the end of the day when I found my first 3 whole Meg teeth of the trip. I came across a large gravel deposit with large rocks mixed into the pile. I scanned over the gravel pile to see if I could surface spot a tooth and sure enough down in the water was this staring back at me. These finds are the reason I decided to make the 2 hour drive for a third time that week. I was already very tired from 2 full days of hunting with little luck but finding 3 nice teeth right at the end of the second day made me want to explore this new area even more. So I headed out for a third time and made it a goal to only hunt this new section of river. I was not disappointed by my choice to go out again. I had planned to only go for half the day as my legs were chaffed from the waders from days 1 and 2 but the spot I was in was too amazing to leave early. I found a nice honey hole within the first 2 hours out and decided to try a few other spots with little luck. I decided to just dig the honey hole for the rest of the day and its surrounding areas. The teeth that came out of this spot were amazing. Meg after Meg piece came out of this hole. In one of my last few screens came my collection heart breaker. The big tooth pictured below measures 4.25 inches as is from the highest edge to the tip. It's a shame that this tooth was so beat up but at least it was mother nature that did the damage and not me. I also found what I think is a Bison tooth right next to the Meg I found by sight in the water. Correct me if I am wrong, I'm not sure on my identification. (PS: I screen shot my river pics because I am not sure if the forum removes meta data from the photos before adding them to a post.)

Found the below tiny bone in the Peace River. It is hollow and apporx. 1" long. Looks like a ball in a lacrosse stick at first glance. From information on the forum and a search for bird bone images I think it is in fact a tiny bird bone. I would appreciate opinions from anyone with experience with this type of bone. Tried to get a photo of the hollow end but it didn't come out well. Thanks!

I found this vert (?) in the Peace River last week and finally got some better pictures to post in hopes of a possible ID. I believe it is Cetacean and don't know if it is possible to id it any further due to the amount of deterioration caused by tumbling around in the river. Any comments would be appreciated. Thanks.

After the holiday rush that included more rain than expected I thought a great way to end the year and the decade would be to make one last pilgrimage to the Peace River. Upon checking the water levels and discharge flow last night and at 7 am this morning it looked like levels were coming down. Outside temperature was about 60 degrees but I figured with the wetsuit all would be good. So, got to the river about 8:30 am and was surprised to see how high the water level was and how fast it was moving. But after the one hour drive and wanting to get in the year/decade ending trip I put the wetsuit on and headed up river. Getting to the spot I was targeting for the day, shown above, I did find it was deeper then expected. The area in the photo that looks like a bit of fast moving rough water is actually a small set of submerged rapids that has a 3' to 4' drop off when water levels are at their lowest. I took the picture while sitting in the kayak where I would usually be standing on a sandy bank. Not to be deterred I went ahead and started digging and sifting. Had to stay out of the middle of the river and work an area where the water flow wouldn't wash everything right off the shovel before I could lift out. Even with Mother Nature's lack of cooperation on water levels I was still able to come up with some nice finds to wrap up the year. A nice Glyptodont Dermal Scute, 1 1/4" full Meg, partial Meg, an Alligator tooth, couple of small Hemis and a pretty good Tiger shark tooth made the trip worth it. It remained overcast and breezy throughout the morning with the temperature staying in the mid 60 degree range. The water was warmer than the air temp even at noon. At that point I decided to call it a day, year and decade and headed for home. Passed by that deceased alligator still wedged against the log in the river. It was being visited by the friendly neighborhood vulture who has been hanging out there with friends. Could see that it had almost been dislodged by the high, fast moving water but I think it has arrived at its final resting place. Took 2 more photos heading down river that show a tree stretching almost all the way across. Last spring I actually passed up and down the river going under this tree. A combination of the tree shifting and falling lower, and the high water level, means passing by it along the east bank for now. This gets a little tricky when the water level drops due to a submerged pipe that runs across the river and rock a outcropping along the bank. Looking forward to my first 2020 Fossil Adventure in the coming week!!

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.

Headed back to the Peace River yesterday after a 17 day absence. Water level and flow were a bit higher than I would have liked due to recent rainfall. I just couldn't stay away any longer! When I started the journey to the river the weather was cool and partly cloudy. Half way there I ran into light rain and fog and began to worry I had made a bad choice to make the trip (rain prediction was 50%). When I got to the river I had to prep the kayak under cover as the rain was coming down heavily. It tapered off as I donned my wetsuit and I set out under cloudy skies. Had almost made it to my planned hunting spot when the skies opened again with a downpour that forced me to hug the bank and hide under some low branches. It stopped raining after about 10 minutes and I continued on. After beaching the kayak I made my usual bank inspection. I reached down at one point and pulled up a handful of gravel from a crevice between some roots. Discovered a nice 1" Tiger shark tooth in my hand to start the day! Worked the area for the rest of the morning and pulled up another four tigers and a 1 3/4" partial Meg along with several other misc teeth. At one point a very large vulture landed on a log in the river within 30' of where I was digging. It sat there for about 15 minutes. It was unusual for it to be so close, and made me wonder if it thought I was it's next meal! Later, after it had left I circled over near where it had been sitting to work the area and finally noticed what the vulture was really interested in. There was a dead alligator, about a 10 footer, wedged belly up under an adjacent log. The alligator was covered with flies and bloated so its true size was hard to determine, but I could see it had some big feet with huge claws! Needless to say, I moved a bit away from the area to continue digging. Came up with some mammoth teeth fragments and a vertebra in the afternoon. Vert is 2" x 1 3/4" x 1 1/2". I will post it separately in the Fossil ID section once I have better photos in hopes of a possible id. attached are photos of the best finds of the day. No photo of the alligator as I was afraid I would drop the phone in the river! It also was not very photogenic.

Hi Everybody! I just moved to the South of Tampa, Florida back in June from North Carolina and am a complete newbie to the fossil hunting scene. Upon recommendation from a local I visited Mannasota Key for a day at the beach with the family where I was told I could find shark teeth. After finding enough teeth and fossils to pique my interest by noon, with just my hands and eyes, I strolled over to the gift shop and bought a "Florida Snow Shovel". By the end of the day I had dozens of teeth and several other bits that were something, but I did not know what. Since then I have made a few more trips down there and have added to my collection and curiosity. For Christmas I received Mark Renz's book "Fossiling in Florida" and finished reading it today. I was super excited to learn that he guides trips on the Peace River less than an hour's drive from me. Mark's book captures the wonderment of fossil hunting. How did this get here? What circumstances led to it's demise? What did the environment look like while it roamed the earth or swam the sea? All of this fascinates me. I have not found anything noteworthy yet, except a new hobby. I see that there might be a TFF community trip to the Peace River coming up soon TBA. Right now I'm just a Cambrian sponge learning all I can. Hopefully with the guidance and wisdom of the group I can pull myself into the Pliocene.

My trips to the Peace this year so far have been so disappointing, I've resorted to bringing home unidentifiable bone scraps. The following photos show 2 of the latest. The one on the right is similar in density to dugong ribs, so it may merely be a tumbled vert, but the angled faces confused me. The other little bone is wedge shaped and looks to have articulating surfaces on the broader edge. Appreciate any suggestions you might have. Thanks.