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  1. I am going to use this as a great place to showcase my personal collection of pliestocene age fossils! First I have a couple of cave hyena jaw sections!
  2. dbrake40

    Mystery Vertebra - Estate Sale

    This vertebra was found at an estate sale in a box of rocks in Minnesota. It is partially mineralized, but I don't believe it is mineralized enough to be much older than Pleistocene. I realize it is fairly damaged but does anybody have reasonable guess as to what it might be from?
  3. SafariSam

    FL Fossil Tooth ID Needed

    Hello everyone. I'm sure this is easy for the more experienced, but I need help with this tooth from a Florida Riverbed in the USA. Thank you! Probably a mammal from the Pleistocene, is that correct? Thanks again.
  4. I was told the rib could belong to some Pleistocene horse or a young mammoth. There were also proposals that the vertebra belonged to the steppe bison or the woolly rhinoceros. They both were found in Eastern Lesser Poland. What do you think? Thanks in advance!
  5. Last weekend after a windy week I decided to go to the beach of Katwijk aan Zee (Netherlands) to see what fossils had washed up. It was a lovely walk along the North Sea. Mammal remains from the Pleistocene (part of the Neogene period) sometimes wash up on the Dutch coast. The bone material comes from layers that are eroded below the sea surface. In the Pleistocene the North Sea was a kind of tundra plain where various animals lived such as woolly mammoth and rhinoceros, the giant deer, eland, wild horses, red deer, musk oxen, steppe bison, cave bear, cave lion, a kind of hyena and the wolf. It is best to search between the somewhat coarser material washed up on the beach, especially after stormy weather like the week before I went looking. The find frequency on the coast is generally quite low. Unfortunately, this time too the yield turned out to be low. But still it was a fantastic afternoon, where I found a fossil Bovidae molar and some fossilized bryozoan colonies. Due to the stormy weather, a lot of material from the sea had been left behind on the beach. There were also many egg cases of rays (especially Raja brachyura) and sharks (Scyliorhinus stellaris). Also found some sea urchins, of the common species the little sea apple, also called common sea apple (Psammechinus miliaris). In addition, we enjoyed the typical 'Dutch skies' with beautiful clouds. All in all, a very pleasant afternoon, with a beautiful sunset. An afternoon to repeat.
  6. Hi! I’m still trying to identify one fossil from a particular unit of Pleistocene/Early Holocene lacustrine silt from my hometown of Saskatoon, but I figured I would look away from it for a bit to try and identify another fossil from the same unit I’ve been unable to classify. I have two specimens, both apparently of the same species. They are both approximately 0.5 millimetres across. They are perfectly circular, with lines radiating from the centre and rings of alternating colours (possibly representing growth lines). One specimen is photographed dorsally, showing its circular shape, the other in profile, showing its umbrella-like, protruding outline. All photos are taken through a microscope with my best camera currently available, an iPhone! My main areas of middling expertise are arthropod and vertebrate fossils, so I have no idea what this is! I have briefly studied fossil foraminifera and diatoms in the past, but it looks like nothing I’ve seen in those areas as well. It reminded me of a small limpet, some type of seed or spore, or perhaps even a strange fish scale, but I have no formal suggestions. I’d highly appreciate any help! I will try to supply any additional information you may need. Thank you!
  7. Matterialpossesion

    Pleistocene Fossils Need too ID

    I need help to identify these fossils I found in the Nishnabotna River at Botna Bend park in Iowa. What animals and what bones they are, thank you.
  8. garyc

    Bone fragment

    Here’s a chunk of crocogator I found on the Brazos River in SE Texas. It doesn’t look like the typical osteoderms that are found . I’m not sure if there’s enough here to identify a specific bone…
  9. Hello! Thank you all for taking the time to read this and (hopefully!) help me identify a very interesting find from Saskatoon! I was on a fossil hunting trip to a local exposure of Pleistocene glacial lake sediments in Saskatoon, and I took home a few samples of it to review later. While looking through one piece (the material is silt but breaks like a rock and is somewhat laminated), I saw this very strange shape. Attached are a few images, some simply in situ, others through a microscope. My apologies if the image quality is not ideal, I do not currently have any better equipment. There are a few images with my fingernail in frame to give you a sense of scale; this thing is very small. It is a kind of dome shape adorned with concentric rings of linked “nodes.” When looking at it, I knew it couldn’t be a pebble or partially buried rock. The thing it reminded me the most of was a Ptychodus tooth or other fish tooth plate, but the “dome” the nodes sit upon is penetrated open in one spot and is hollow. While I suppose this doesn’t rule tooth out, it does make me doubt that possibility. In addition, the nodes appear to resemble fish scales, especially ganoid scales, as some are rhomboidal in shape and all have the glassy coating those scales tend to have. There is also what appears to be a bone fragment near the dome. This is where my own suggestions end, I have no other ideas as to what this weird thing might be! Simple confirmation of the nodes as fish scales would probably satisfy me, but identification of them as ganoid would be even better. Please let me know if I can provide any extra clarification! Thank you!
  10. Mochaccino

    Modern or fossil cat canine?

    This is described as a feline canine from the Pleistocene of Africa, 7cm long. Does that seem reasonable or does the fossil seem modern? And if it's a fossil, can anyone identify what animal it came from? Thanks.
  11. vietnamfossil

    Rodent bone from Niah caves need ID

    These bone from ex-collection of Tom Harrison which excavated in Niah from the 50s - 60s. The location is Lobang Hangus which layer 30” dated to 12500BP. I know those bone could be from rodent but I don’t know if it is squirrel or rat or any rodent. Please help me to get it identify! Thank you
  12. DSMJake

    Pleistocene bone ID

    My first thought was proboscidean carpal, but wasn’t sure. Missouri creek find. Thanks!
  13. johnnyvaldez7.jv

    Another Equus Incisor?

    So I was excited to find what I'm pretty sure is another horse incisor...it's a little bigger than the last one I found a few weeks ago, but still stoked to find another after all the equus cheek teeth I've been finding. It's a little darker than the other so age probably can't be determined after the tannins info I received last time...but still a cool find in my book. Found on a gravel bank in Southeast Texas. If it's anything else.. would love and welcome feedback. The incisor on the right was the find from a few weeks back....left specimen was from yesterday's hunt. Lots of finds on account of the very low river level.
  14. fossil_lover_2277

    Large Mystery Fossil Bones from North Carolina

    These two bones come from North Carolina, and the site they come from produces mostly Cretaceous Black Creek group material, but also some marine Pliocene and terrestrial Pleistocene material. Any help would be appreciated! The first is clearly a limb bone shaft, femur, tibia, something like that. Not sure if it's crocodilian, turtle, dinosaur, or terrestrial mammal though (I'm leaning towards terrestrial mammal). The second bone I'm thinking might be some type of hip bone, I was thinking possibly the ischium of some large croc, but I'm not sure. Could very easily be some random cetacean skull fragment. Edit: I think the second bone may be a crocodile coracoid. That large hole may be the coracoid foramen. Let me know what you think. Bone 1: Bone 2:
  15. Found this cool complete little bone while screening some gravel in a Summerville creek. Seems familiar but not enough to hazard a guess. Thanks for looking!
  16. Is there any chance of narrowing this down? A friend of my daughter found it in Hertfordshire, south east England. It was from a disused gravel pit and is presumably Pleistocene. The underlying geology is Cretaceous. It appears to be a tooth root with a bit of crown surviving, maybe not enough to ID. Bear (Ursus deningeri premolar?) has been tentatively suggested though the images I can find suggest that it's too large for that. Possibly U. spelaus? but I really don't know anything about this kind of thing and that may be wildly out. @Fossildude19 @JohnJ Could you possibly tag anyone who knows about this sort of thing? Thank you for looking!
  17. This is a Pleistocene Cave Bear jaw from Romania. I'd like to know if this is authentic and if there has been restoration? Thanks.
  18. Brandy Cole

    Equus Navicular?

    Found this little piece a while back, and I'm pretty sure it's a navicular. It looks similar to the equus navicular examples I've seen on the site, but there do appear to be a few differences. The differences might just be due to wear, but I wanted to see if anyone had a different take. Blocks are square inches.
  19. vietnamfossil

    Rhinoceros or buffalo rib?

    Hi folks! Recently I found a rib from a Paleolithic site which dating about 21000- 10000BP. As the size of this huge, I don’t know if it belongs to the rhinoceros buffalo? Note: I try to put together with the vertebrae of bison priscus from Europe (TH8 bone) and it bigger.
  20. Hi everyone! This thread is dedicated to our Southeast asis fossil cave adventures and finds. One of the important sites for the Stegodon - Pongo - Ailuropoda fauna of the Pleistocene. This not only just fossils but also the Paleolithic and Neolithic found. Following this and I wil explain more experiment on IDyng the cave fossils and some basic things to know the age of them. Hope you guys enjoy it! This is my first trip in North Viet Nm. Cave entrance (usually Pleistocene cave have very small entrance) Just 15 minutes and I discovered a hominid tooth. It not my first time but I really love that moments. I use to found mammals before but just normal deer fossils. Looking for fossils into these cave deposites and cave breccia is not easy
  21. I found this broken end of a long bone several months ago near Houston in the late Pleistocene gravel deposits of the Beaumont and Lissie Formations. Here are some pictures (with each grid on the graphing paper being 1/4 of an inch): I know that it's the end of a tibia because the grooves on the end are shaped to match an astragalus (ankle bone), and that their slanted angle indicates a perissodactyl like a horse, tapir, or rhino rather than an artiodactyl like a bison, pig, deer, or camel. Based on the size of the bone, I think I can pretty easily rule out rhino, which leaves only horse or tapir as a possibility. Now, I've never found a single tapir bone in all the time I've spent hunting in this area, whereas it seems like there's such an overabundance of horse material that I'm literally tripping over their teeth and bones any time I take a step (that and turtle shell fragments)! Needless to say the odds are definitely in favor of horse. What's stumped me is that it seems just too small to be a horse bone - at the very least, not one from an adult anyway. I know that three-toed horses were often smaller than their one-toed cousins, and I've found their teeth before as it's not too uncommon for them to wash down from the older formations north of where I'm hunting, so that's also a possibility. My main problem is that I can't find any reliable measurements online for the distal end of a tapir tibia to compare mine to. So if anyone has any old literature with some helpful information or (even better) pictures, I'd love to see them. Any help is appreciated! @Shellseeker @Harry Pristis @garyc
  22. I've been dragging my feet on posting trip reports on two excursions out to a river in SE Texas simply because I hate having to convert image file formats but I've finally bit the bullet and am ready to report! First up is a trip a month ago. The weather has been brutally hot so I have to head to and leave the site earlier than id like but I've recently found a way out to a gravel bar that's actually an island in the river and had pretty good luck on both occasions I've been there hunting. Drought conditions have exposed large areas of the gravel bars and might be the reason why this spot is accessible on foot lately rather than requiring a boat of some description. I should mention that I've still got a lot of learning to do so I'll admit all my ID's are tentative and would welcome any corrections or assistance. Also if anyone wants individual shots of different angles of any of this material with scale or measurements I'd be happy to do so. One last thing worth mentioning is my collection bias, I tend to leave behind any invertebrate material (mostly Cretaceous Texigryphaea) and an absolute ton of petrified wood. First is a shot of the gravel bar from the bank. Second photo is highly fragmented turtle/tortoise shell in situ that I took so I could vinac the pieces back together once I got home. Third shot is the sum total of the fossils recovered once they'd been cleaned and reassembled in the case of that turtle/tortoise shell. Fourth shot is a close up of the two proximal horse phalanx and three horse teeth. Fifth photo is all turtle/tortoise shell including the reassembled fragment. Sixth is a bunch of unidentified tooth enamel, a couple possible tusk fragments up top, and mastodon and mammoth enamel on the right hand side. Seventh is a group shot of the unidentifiable material. Eighth and final photo is of three pieces from the unidentifiable group that I can at least hazard a guess as to which element/family they might have come from-specifically part of a phalanx I believe, a large rib fragment and a small hollow long bone I assume is from a bird but one epiphysis is totally gone and the other is so damaged I doubt its possible to say any more about. All in all I'd call it a pretty successful outing! (for some reason the order I uploaded the photo's isn't the order they posted in so the 4th photo was moved up to the first position, whoops!)
  23. val horn

    unknowns from tar river NC

    I have always thought to bring home whatever I find, as I can throw it out later. Now that I am starting to go through old stuff I am finding it harder than I expected. Some are clearly junk, some are small pieces of bone without any identifying character but I remember how much fun I had finding these pieces. the good part is looking at what I had forgotten about. Here are two that I still hope someone can maybe identify. The first is a very heavy dense piece of long bone 15 cm by almost 4 cm with a partial surface on one epiphysis. the second is a very light bone (making me guess whale) with curves and flat surfaces that maybe somebody else can place into context.
  24. Mastodon Skeleton Discovered in Grand Rapids, Kent County, Michigan Oakland County Times, August 2022 Kent County road crews discover Mastodon bones by Meghan Bunchman, WOODTV, August 12, 2022 Yours, Paul H.
  25. So it's slightly embarrassing to admit this, but after two years on the forum this is (finally) my first trip report. I've been inspired by the amazing trip write-ups that @Jared C has been giving all of us every week and figured that now that I've finally had a week of finds worth writing about this year that it was my turn to try my hand at the same. I'm 21 and still in the thick of college. I'm attending Baylor University as a Geology major right now after having switched majors at the end of my freshman year. I've always had a love for fossils and prehistoric life and for many, many years I would tell everyone I knew that I was going to grow up and be a paleontologist. Eventually that passion faded away, only to come roaring back during the early months of the COVID pandemic when I stumbled across my first mammoth bone while searching for (and failing to find) arrowheads along a section of river close to my home in southwest Houston. During a brief stint in Boy Scouts I had heard stories about mammoth bones being found in the area, but I never really believed them. I had always assumed that the only fossils to be found in Texas were in the Cretaceous and Permian rocks to the north and the west, and since I was a kid who was still young enough to rely on their parents to travel anywhere there was a fat chance of me ever getting to find any of them. But suddenly, with this one unidentifiable chunk of mammoth bone in my hand, I realized there was an entire world of fossils I had never known about not more than a 15 minute drive from my front porch. Needless to say, I was excited, and the next several months were a whirlwind of plotting locations on Google Maps, reading Hulbert's book on Florida fossil vertebrates cover to cover, scouring the USGS Pocket Texas geology map, and enduring more sunburns and mosquito bites than I ever thought possible for a single human being. The kid that was obsessed with dinosaurs had finally come back, and it wasn't long before I decided that this was what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing. So, with that overly-long explanation out of the way, let me tell you about last week! I've been swamped with work for the two math courses I've been taking for transfer credit all summer, but last week I was finally able to find some time to go out fossil hunting again. Anyone who's in Texas right now knows just how bad the heat has been lately. Fortunately for me that also meant my favorite river in the world was low enough to have hopefully exposed some more Pleistocene goodies. I returned to a spot close by that I'd been to before to try my luck and see if there was anything to be found. Now, while I didn't find anything that made my jaw hit the floor as I have in the past, I came away very satisfied and with a small collection of fossils that do a great job of representing the diversity of the vertebrate fauna in this part of Texas during the late Pleistocene. A was the find of the day, and a first for me: a camelid toe bone (likely Hemiauchenia or Palaeolama based on a post in Fossil ID by @garyc several years ago). I picked it up on my way back up the riverbank and although it's not as heavily mineralized as I'd like, beggars can't be choosers! It was definitely the trip maker in my opinion. B and C are pieces of turtle plastron, the former from the hard-shelled variety and the latter from the soft-shelled one. If you don't know what the difference is, I recommend looking up a picture of a soft-shelled turtle - they look pretty funny. Identifying hard-shelled turtle shell fragments to species, or even genus, is near impossible unless the piece in question is diagnostic, like a nuchal section. Soft-shelled turtles are a little easier, since as far as I know Apalone ferox was the only one of its kind swimming around here during the late Pleistocene. Turtle shell fragments are easily the most common fossil I come across, possibly tied with horse fossils. I don't know for sure, but my theory is that it's an issue of preservation bias. Turtles already live in water and muddy areas, so when they die there's a greater chance that their bodies will end up in the type of environment that's conducive to creating fossils. They're also encased in a giant bony shell, meaning they simply have more "bones" than your average animal. Both of these factors taken together equals a LOT of fossilized turtle shell fragments scattered across the river. D is an osteoderm from the giant armadillo, Holmesina septentrionalis. They're one of my favorite Pleistocene animals. Although this is only my fifth osteoderm, they are much, much more common finds than those belonging to their much larger and more famous cousin the glyptothere, of which I only have one (and it's a hesitant ID at best). Just means I need to make more trips! E is a neural section from a turtle shell, the part that denotes where the spine is. F isn't anything special, just a piece of petrified wood that I found interesting because of the visible knot in the bark. G is a fragment of a mastodon tooth. It's not the best one I've ever found, but it still made me incredibly excited when I first saw it half-buried in the ground and hoped that I was only seeing a small portion of a much larger tooth, which I've still yet to find and is near the top of my bucket list. Here's an in-situ photo I took: H are two fragments of the incredibly common horse teeth that no trip to the river is complete without. And last but not least, I is a fragment of mammoth (or mastodon) tusk, recognizable by the criss-crossed Schreger lines along the interior cross section that unfortunately isn't visible in the photo. Several days later I would return to the river, this time in a different spot. After spending an hour or two with nothing to show for it, I began the long walk back to my car a little disappointed. On my way, however, I spotted an algae-covered rock that seemed much larger than the rocks that normally make up the gravel that covers the river's many sandbars. Acting on a hunch I dug it out and flipped it over. And just like that, the day was saved! Sitting in my hand was a mammoth carpal bone, the first complete mammoth bone I've ever come across. To make the situation even sweeter, the sandbar that's visible at the top of the picture below is the exact spot where I first found that one chunk of unidentifiable mammoth bone two years ago. If I had found this bone when I had first started fossil hunting I would have had no idea what I was looking at. But having read many of the Peace River posts on here religiously in the past I had a pretty good idea of what I had found as I carried the surprisingly heavy bone back to my car. Once I got home, a quick search through the University of Michigan's online database of 3D fossil models proved me right: The bone was barely mineralized, if at all, so it was quite crumbly in spots, especially along the section that had been exposed above the ground when I first found it. It took several days sitting in the sun in my backyard for the water that had soaked through every pore at its center to finally dry up and leave it a whole pound lighter. I'll have to get around to consolidating it sometime soon when I have the time. As there's a pretty good chance I might get a job working at the famous Waco Mammoth Site this fall when I head back to school, I'll have plenty of expert advice on how to go about doing it the right way! Near the end of the week I traveled back to Waco with my roommate to move everything out of our old apartment and into the new one that we'll be staying in this upcoming school year. But on the way I couldn't resist the temptation to stop at one of my favorite fossil spots in the state, the legendary Whiskey Bridge just west of College Station. I've been to Whiskey Bridge several times before in the past (once with the Dallas Paleontological Society), and although I am fond of the plentiful and exquisitely preserved gastropods that the site is so well-known for, I'm a vertebrate lover first and foremost. As such, as soon as I learned that shark teeth could be found amongst the Eocene-aged sediments under the bridge, it became my all-consuming quest to find one every time I visit. I've found several in the past, including a very nice tiger shark tooth. This time I didn't have much luck when it came to shark teeth in particular, but did have more success finding fish material than I've ever had in the past. First was an incredibly large (and incredibly sharp!) pectoral fin spine from some species of fish that I'll likely never know. I found it just sitting on top of a pile of loose dirt and at first assumed it was part of a twig. I kept it just to check later, and it seems to match some pictures I was able to find online, not to mention the shiny black coloring being the most noticeable feature of vertebrate material at the site. The fish spine was followed up by a half hour of diligently scouring the lines of shell hash in the upper reaches of the exposed river bank for shark teeth. According to a graduate student I met on the DPS field trip who had written a paper on another Eocene formation in Texas and had done more reading on the one exposed at Whiskey Bridge than I had, the shell hash is the best location for finding teeth as it represents periodic storm deposits. I didn't find any shark teeth this time, but did come across what I think is probably a barracuda/mackerel tooth (Scomberomorus) and a fragment of one from a stingray (Myliobatis). Here's some pictures of them in-situ, easily recognizable because of their glossy black preservation: Finally, as the sun was beginning to set, I saw something that made my heart stop. What looked like the exposed base of a crocodile tooth was sticking out of the side of one of the steep riverbank cliff faces. I didn't even know crocodile material could be found at the site, so I immediately took as many pictures as I could in case it was a significant find and began extracting it. Unfortunately, the surrounding sediment was more tough than I was expecting, and it came out in pieces just as the sun started to disappear over the horizon. With the "tooth" now in the palm of my hand, I realized that I was completely wrong about what I had been looking at - there was no point, or cutting edge, or any other features present that would tell me what I had was a tooth. Annoyed and more than a little disappointed, I trudged back up the hillside under the bridge with aching hands. It wasn't until I got to Waco that I did some research and found out that although I hadn't found something as exciting as a crocodile tooth, I had still found something that I had never seen at the bridge before. Apparently, there's a species of ray-finned fish from the Eocene that's still pretty poorly understood known as Cylindricanthus. Fossils like the one I had found are hypothesized to have been part of the rostrum at the end of the snout, somewhat similar to modern-day swordfish. Here's a post I found on here from ten years ago about a complete rostrum that someone also excavated from Whiskey Bridge: So all-in-all, a pretty successful trip! Other finds I didn't mention included a rare-ish species of gastropod that I had never seen before (Gegania antiquata), a nice example of a cone snail (Conus sauridens), some fish ear bones, what I think is a shrimp trace burrow, and what is probably a very, very small, and very, very worn-down shark tooth. Here's a photo of everything laid out together: Before I wrap up this very long trip report, I wanted to thank everyone here on the forum. You have all been so helpful and welcoming over these past two years and the advice and information I've been given has been invaluable. If I had never found this place I don't know if I would have ever decided that fossils were so important to me that I wanted to make a career out of studying and learning about them. Thank you guys from the bottom of my heart. - Graham
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