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I was out yesterday... No fantastic finds but a few interesting ones. A Shark tooth, 38 x 23 mm. I thought it was a Shortfin Mako, my friend said giant thresher. Help @Al Dente, @MarcoSr. What differentiates the two... The 2nd is a fish spine. I am used to seeing Catfish spines that look like the one below..... I am wondering and usually pleasantly surprised, when I reach out fro detailed knowledge on any fossil topic, in this case identification of catfish spines.

Hello everyone! Reporting back from a trip to the peace yesterday 5/15! It ended up being a really beautiful day! Taking into consideration that we’ve been pushing into the upper 90s lately I was not looking forward to that 2pm heat stroke in my wetsuit. However I saw the depth drop back down after these heavy rains and figured I had maybe a few more trips before the gators, bugs and rain kick me out for the season for good! I launched from Wauchula to go to the usual gravel islands upriver and only saw 1 juvenile gator where as a few weeks ago I saw 3 6-8 footers. I was hoping it being early and chilly they were somewhere away from me. I guess I’ll never know! The areas I was digging in only had a foot and some inches of gravel before hitting the limestone. This was frustrating as I spent all night reading to refresh myself on “DIG DEEPER” philosophy we are all so familiar with. I was finding the usual, frags and smalls with nothing really to show for my efforts so I headed back downstream and spent a few hours at one spot with similar efforts. I decided to drift back down to the boat ramp and pass it because there was a 4 footer guarding the gravel bar near the bridge. I ended up at a spot with a few people who had walked in about 50-100 yards downstream. They decided to leave and as they were passing me one of them stepped into a few foot hole. I thought that would be a good spot to dig as it looked 2 feet deeper than the one I had started digging in and I wasn’t wanting to put in any more serious effort for the day. After about 10 minutes of digging around that hole I noticed the gravel / rocks in this area were larger than the upriver gravel bars I was at earlier. I also pulled out 2 bullet casing, one 22 and one I couldn’t identify and some colored brown glass. Even though this layer I was digging in was basically clay textured karst / white matrix it was almost impossible to get through with my non spade tipped shovel. I started to widen out a little bit on the layer of gravel above the matrix and then I pulled this out... Sometimes this place makes me wonder if I should buy a lottery ticket on the way home. Could anyone give me some more info on this find? The Facebook group I am on suggested mammoth, and maybe Colombian mammoth. This is definitely the best tooth I have found on the river so far!

My stepdaughter found this tooth in the Peace River (FL) on our last trip out. I tried to take decent photos of the chewing surface, but my hands are shaky (shakier after Covid). Can anyone ID the species on this one? If not, I can have her take some better photos.

I have acquired 2 Marine mammal fossils in the last few days. One is a dolphin periotic found in the Peace River Thursday. @Boesse walked me thru the identification of this find a couple of years back Pomatodelphis is an extinct genus of river dolphin from Middle Miocene marine deposits in Alabama, Florida, Brazil, Germany and France. I thought it was similar to a river dolphin, but when I examined it today, it is about the same size but otherwise.... not so much Here are a few other angles While I have previously found a number of Dolphin periotics in the Peace River, this one seems more complex than the others. @gigantoraptor has offered some fossils for sale, including some STH marine mammals. He had this bulbous rooted whale tooth which I purchased. I am attracted to them and solicit any comments or identifications from whale tooth enthusiasts. !! Right now ,my only guess is Scaldicetus .sp.

Sometimes it is hard to believe how lucky I am in hunting fossils. I was on the Peace River prospecting. Mostly small teeth (no GWs, Makos, Megs). My find of the day was half a giant tortoise humerus. With the afternoon moving to a close, this Tusk dropped into my sieve. I think that this is a Mammoth yearling and I am looking for confirmation or skepticism. 1) It is about 7 inches long with the tip broken. It is 2.25 inches (57 mm) in diameter at the butt. 2) The butt end I believe to be round rather than oval and not broken. I have seen many broken tusks and they do not have concentric circles in a flat pattern. 3) The segment is straight , not curved. There is a Youtube video on Woolly Mammoth tusk growth. It seems to curve after the 1st year. In the photo, my find might be the green section. 4) I will figure out Mastodon versus Mammoth once I allow the tusk to dry and see the schreger lines. Hopefully, TFF will be able to ID first.. @digit has been playing with hosenose tusks and @Harry Pristis has lots of skills in all fossils Florida. Please chime in... I will check responses with my cell. This is one of those rare occasions where I am going hunting on back to back days.. I must be feeling my oats.

I hunt frequently. I find what I believe to be peccary teeth not infrequently. As we know , there is a problem. Modern pigs (domestic, wild, boars) have peccaries as ancestors. Teeth of modern pigs and peccaries are similar. Are the differences significant enough to be able to easily differentiate the two species. I thought they were. I am going to use a couple of @Harry Pristis fantastic photos, which remain the best resource for this discussion. In this photo of domestic pig from Florida, note the circular petal nature of of the chewing surface on each tooth.. Sort of reminds me of Gomphothere teeth. Next ,lets look at Peccary: Mylohyus is a Pleistocene version of the species. Note the straighter lines down the center and less obvious or none existent circular petals. I found this one a couple of years back Pliocene peccary is Platygonus bicalaratus. Peccary teeth look more like Mastodon than Gomphothere. So, why present how I differentiate? One is to ask if others use different techniques, and the other is that I just found a tooth in the Peace River, that I thought was Peccary (Mylohyus) and my hunting companion, who has done this longer than I felt was domestic Pig. I am seeking an identification: The tooth is 15.5 mm in length and 14.5 mm in width. Thanks for the help. @PODIGGER @Plantguy @digit

Out on a gorgeous. A fossil hunting friend found this 27.3 mm incisor. He asked me to get identification from TFF. Finds from this location are predominately Blancan == Pliocene. On a previous occasion, he found a dolphin tooth, but the root fractured on the way home. He is concerned about the fragility of this incisor's root. The only consolidation experiences I have are Mammoth/Mastodon teeth and bones with Butvar. Should he consolidate this tooth and with what process?

Got up early, went out hunting to a favorite location with good friends. I had searched this spot so often that I went in believing that I would have to prospect new locations before today was over. Turned out not to be true. After 5-10 small shark teeth in each of the 1st 2 sieves, this interesting fossil fell into my lap. It is 6.5 inches long and 2.75 inches at its widest point. Going to be a great day. I will make some observations. 1) At 2.75 inches wide, it is far smaller than the width of an adult tooth and must be from a juvenile. 2) It consists of approximately 3 plates. A complete juvenile tooth might be 10-12+ plates 3) The section I have found has not been chewed upon YET.. It was likely un_erupted when the juvenile died. 4) Maybe redundant to #3, the section I have found is 100% enamel, 0% roots/dentin/cementum Questions: When one of my friends looked at the fossil, he said that I had found the "posterior" end of the tooth, because the "fingers" you see, are only present in this volume on the posterior end. News to me, for Mammoth tooth experts, is it true? Here is a very interesting link https://www.fossilera.com/pages/about-mammoth-molars which includes this discussion: So, if there are 2 set of deciduous teeth between Age 3 and Age 20, let's speculate that each set lasts more or less 8 years... My find was being created as a "deciduous" tooth, and creation of a deciduous tooth happens around 4 years of age and 12 years of age. My gut feeling looking at a lot of deciduous mammoth teeth, many medium in size and many larger in size is that my find is one of the larger "juvenile teeth" created at Age 12. All comments appreciated, especially from someone who knows about sizes of deciduous mammoth teeth. p.s. I did take some comfort in seeing scientific papers that estimated modern elephant age based on tooth size... and the comments that it should also apply to Mammoths.

I immediately thought toe bone or hoof core, but it did not look like Equus or Antiquus, too big ( 2.5, 2.25, 1.6 inches) to be Camel/Llama or tapir... ). I have looked around the forum and interent. Tapir seems to be closest, but I say that with little confidence.

I was out hunting the Peace River yesterday. It was a great day to be there. I did not find a special gem, but did pretty well on small shark teeth. (Some nice upper hemis, a nice Sand Tiger, and even a small Thresher). Additional mammal finds were far and few between. A couple of dolphin verts, a dolphin bulla, horse tooth, ball of a femur. What I am trying to ID is that little canine, dead center bottom in photo above. I am used to putting up photos of canines 1.25 inches and up. I have always made likely incorrect assumptions of what these very small canines come from. Since this is my 1st time discussing undersized canines, I would like suggestions on how many possibilities am I dealing with..... So , small predator, likely much smaller then Raccoon, possum, skunk.

Went hunting with my Son. That in itself made it a great day. We have grown closer as we age and the separation over the last year has only made our time together more enjoyable. For most of the day, we had the numerous and excellent finds that the Peace River hunts famous. Things picked up in the last hour. Large Tooth: Clearly an upper, could be M1, or M2 or M3. The table below has measurements for a M1 and M2, but not M3. This find 35.1 mm, 22.6 mm, and 67.1 mm respectively, so I thought "maybe" the M2. I also found this photo on the Internet: That tells me that this is the "left" maxilla, and just looking at the "shape" pattern (above and below photos), it is either M2 or M3. So, I am looking for error in my thinking. and most of all I am looking for TFF Bison experts to tell me whether it is a M2 or a M3 and why.... so I'll go after the usual Bison expertise suspects. @Harry Pristis @Brett Breakin' Rocks @garyc @digit @Thomas.Dodson Please add others you think of , Jack

So I am hunting the Peace River and finding good stuff, like mastodon verts, horse teeth, colorful hemis and into my sieve pops a broken sand dollar...... and I do a little dance , got a smile ear to ear , because I am hoping , with a little help from my friends that this this Echinoid will help to identify the formation I am hunting, maybe Pliocene or middle Miocene. There are a lot of years between them. @Harry Pristis indicated that the silicified shells might more likely imply middle Miocene. The echinoid has an interesting shape and no holes.... I think it is possible.... @Coco, @MikeR, @Sacha

Pretty nice day yesterday Sunshine, but cool, especially if the clouds blocked the sun and the breeze picked up. I was glad to have a 5 mm wet suit. My find of the day is a nice Ursus m2. These are rare !!! especially for me. I have found exactly 4 in 12 years of hunting. At this size, a female or juvenile. It is nice being on the river. The effort in digging and sifting is "on automatic". I think mostly about fossils and the Peace River. Salt water is not all that common in the center of Florida around Fort Meade, going north. According to historical sea level data, the last time we have lots of salt water was 3-4 million years ago , and previous to that, around 12 MYAs. When I see a sea shell in my sieve, I always wonder WHEN did that shell contained its original inhabitant. Was it 3 million or 12 million or maybe earlier. At a minimum , I need a shell I do not recognize in our modern assemblage of Florida shells. Hopefully, I have some friends on TFF who can comment. @MikeR is definitely one of those... This fragment might be Turritella magnasulcus, from the late Pliocene of the Tamiami Fm So, is there enough of this shell to tell us what it is ? When was this shell being dropped?

Last Thursday, found a bunch of reef type fossils in the Peace River... Sort while watching the NFL today. Here are a few of the smaller items: A ray denticle, a tapir cap, cypress wood, and ....

All about the same size,and maybe all marine. A tip or a root. See the following thread for clues... maybe A bone.

Out hunting , everything was small. 1. Symphyseal ? I actually see some slight serrations on upper right of 1st photo. 2. )Just to show off my only one of these for the day 3) 29 mm in length. 4) Complete ?? 25 mm

Went hunting yesterday. Gorgeous day. Fast currents, deep water that is forecast to get deeper and faster by Monday. Mostly small , broken shark teeth, but there were 4 that were fun to find. A partial Sloth tooth, heavily worn at the chewing surface. I am thinking Harlan's. I found it in the 2nd sieve , which kept me at that location for the next 6 hours. Note the heavy wear on the left side of the chewing surface. A couple of hours later, I just noted a nice Equus canine on the edge of the screen and grabbed it before it slid back into the depths. The lack of river wear on the tooth makes this one on my finer examples. For a little while, I was finding some geologic material that glinted back at me. It seemed calcified, and could have been coral or sand concretions. L 34, W 27, H 22 mm, Comments appreciated. Finally, the target of this thread. This is only the 3rd or 4th of this type of vertebra that I have found, the others being smaller and more water worn. Convex/Concave ends, lots of fine lines, no obvious processes, L 25, W 23, H 18 mm zz

My hunting days, during South Florida's rainy season are few and far between. I wait for and really appreciate the opportunities that come my way. I was out with a friend in the sunshine today. We were finding lots of small teeth, plus sand tigers, upper/lower hemis, a few small Makos, and I even picked up a Meg. There also were a number of sting ray teeth, denticles and broken spines. Then , in the 2nd last sieve of the day, I found one of my favorites -- a whale tooth, but not just any whale. I have found a number of Kogiopsis .sp teeth and somewhat fewer Scaldicetus teeth, both of which are know to exist in Florida. This one is neither Kogiopsis or Scaldicetus... Very odd. Is that enamel on the outside with flaking horizontal bands tradition or cementum? A little bit of a "bulb" at the root end, and one of the oddest root terminations I have ever seen on something I think to be whale. Last year I was fortunate to be "gifted" a number of Aulophyseter morrice teeth from a friend who hunts Shark Tooth Hill. I added a photo of this newly found tooth, just to indicate that there are other whales with teeth this size, even though they do not match other characteristics. I had a fantastic day. I found a high quality whale tooth that very likely can not be identified. and finding one gives me hope that I will find more like it.I decided to publish photos just in case others have found similar teeth... Jack

It is hard finding days to hunt in South Florida. 95% of my locations are 3-4 feet over my head. It is only by marking and remembering low water locations that I get to continue in these heavy rain months. Even now the available locations are limited, and thus the finds can also be limited, but not today. This location is a Mio_Pliocene that can produce very rare items. My hunting buddy found the 1st. A badly worn (old individual) molar cap.. Usually the caps I find are unused, pristine, making them far easier to identify. The measurements around the edges are 17x 17x x 15.5. This is very small for the mammals that traditionally have caps in my hunting areas (Mastodon, peccary, tapir, dugong, manatee, please add others you can think of in Florida). All comments and suggestions appreciated.

I was fortunate to find a place to dig yesterday. Most of my hunting areas are well under water and over my head). Think mid to late Miocene with very few Pleistocene mammal fossils and even then 80% marine. I have not found a lot of fish teeth (primarily 90% barracuda, which tend to be wide and flat). This tooth is different and I am hoping some TFF members will recognize it from their hunting areas. The length is 16mm, the root is 5.8 x 5.0 mm. All suggestions appreciated. Here is the only mammal fossil I found confirming pliocene_miocene. I am hopeful of figuring it out from the length and details of the APL.

I found this Hemipristis serra tooth a couple of years back. Looking at the left photo, I noted the bite marks, and the fact that the distance between each bite mark was approximately the same as the distance between this tooth's serrations!! So I make up a possible story. This shark was in a feeding frenzy, and under the feeding pressure, this tooth (like other shark teeth) fell out, but before it could clear the mouth area, the shark bit down again, leaving these telltale marks. There are likely other "possibles", but I prefer this one. Now more recently, I have another tooth, in this case a Galeocerdo cuvier, and interestingly it also has a bite mark. Once again the distance seems to be the same between the bite marks and between the serrations on this tooth. I notice a lot. Look at that little hole in the enamel above the bite marks. I have no story that explains that hole. But my story breaks down. The bite marks on THIS tooth seem post _ fossilization not in the enamel, but on the enamel. So I opened this thread to attract others who have bite marks on their shark teeth, and ask some of the shark tooth experts their insights. @Northern Sharks@Al Dente@siteseer@MarcoSr@Plax@sixgill pete

Fossilized 1/2 bone, 4.5 inches, Seems to be a humerus. Searching the internet, I came across this photo of a much larger complete humerus. What do you think?

Hi, I am an alligator from Florida's Peace River. I live in a drainage pipe near an unnamed overpass on Highway 17. I hear that fossil-hunters often have questions regarding me and my fellow reptiles. I will now answer any and all questions.

After a two month Covid lockdown hiatus, I finally managed to hit the river again yesterday. Loaded up the truck and headed out to Gardner. I wanted to spend some more quality time at the same spot where I found a ground sloth phalanx on a previous trip - I was hoping to find more of that sloth. This spot is a little further away than my usual Gardner spots, so it sees less pressure and I suspected some megs might be hiding there because I kept finding broken frags and lots of other shark species. A couple of notes - 1) The long dirt road leading to the boat ramp has been resurfaced by the county. It's a much more pleasant ride and a lot less bumpy now. As recently as my last trip in March, that road was pretty darn rough and you would vibrate your vehicle to death if you drove over 5 or 10mph. The county laid down some new gravel and re-graded it. It's much better now and won't tear up your suspension. 2) When we arrived yesterday morning, the USGS Zolfo gauge said the height was 4 feet and the flow was 52cfs. That gauge is also a pretty good indicator for what to expect at Gardner. It was very low. The lowest I have personally seen it there. Long stretches were too shallow to paddle, so be prepared to do a lot of walking and pulling the kayak/canoe behind you. Also, the low flow rate was making the water very soupy and cloudy. Visibility was poor, even in the shallow spots. It wasn't a full-blown algae bloom yet, but getting there. When the gauge height starts getting below 4.25, then it's almost too low to hunt. Personally, my sweet spot is between 4.5 and 5.0. If you are going to hunt Gardner, keep the gauge in mind and adjust your hunting accordingly. Diving or snorkeling in that soup would have been unproductive. So, after some paddling and a lot of walking, we (my wife and I), arrived at the hunting spot. I spent about 5 hours there and probably turned over about 75-100 sifters worth of gravel. Some other hunters had already hit the spot, because I saw shovel marks and spoil piles. That explains why I wasn't finding as much as I had hoped. Even being more remote and seeing less pressure, this spot still gets hunted. I really need to invest in a motor to get back and forth to the really distant places. I found a nice handful of smaller teeth, a nice large thresher with good color, and one decent megalodon. My first meg since 2018. I was pretty happy about that, since I seemed to be cursed lately with megs. I couldn't buy a meg to save my life over the last two seasons. I found a few half-megs, but this was my first intact decent one in quite a while. It has a little bit of root damage, but is 95% complete and about 2 inches. Not spectacular, but it broke the snide. We only saw one small gator and one turtle. Lots of birds were everywhere and there were a lot of butterflies fluttering around the wildflowers - a lot of yellow wildflowers (coreopsis), so that was pretty to see along the banks. We also saw a great blue heron catch and swallow a small snake. That was pretty neat to see. My wife is still downloading the photos, so I will post those later. My back still hurts, but we had a great time and enjoyed getting out. Surprisingly, for a friday on a holiday weekend, the ramp and river were pretty quiet. We only saw a small handful of other people the entire day. I suspect this weekend will be busier. PS - a couple of hours after we left, a storm hit the Peace basin and the river jumped a foot.

I recently found a broken canine (split in two) that made me think. The site usually produces a fair amount of Pliocene fossils. Here it is. The length of the tooth is 2.5 inches of which 1.5 inches is enamel. I know a lot about Florida whale teeth and I have frequently said that horizontal banding rings are a "tell" for whale. This one has such horizontal rings. However it has differences from the "normal" whale teeth I find: 1) The enamel is on the outside of the tooth and longer than a tooth this size should have; 2) Most Florida whale teeth have slightly rounded rather than sharp tips. Here are some more common Florida whale shapes: Maybe it is Orycterocetus or or even a large alligator tooth. Comments appreciated. At the same location, I also found a bird bone and wondered if it had a Pliocene age. Maybe @Auspex can assist, identifying the bone and candidates Jack.