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This was found on a river gravel bar in southern Minnesota. There are glacial gravel deposits in the area. I believe it may be a piece of tusk bark (the outer bark or cementum) Thoughts?

Proboscidean from Southern MN gravel pit on Minnesota river. Mammoth or Mastodon? The acetabulum (socket) is approximately 7" in diameter. Sorry for lack of scale

I may have created a monster. I took the son of a friend fossil hunting on the Brazos River in SE Texas a couple of days ago. He’s about to be a senior in high school and has never been fossil hunting. He went out by himself today and found something that has stumped me. He texted me pics and my immediate thought was Mammoth tooth in bone. I decided to drive to where he was since it wasn’t really out of my way home. Even in person I can’t decide if this is an unerupted juvenile mammoth tooth in jaw bone or something entirely different. I see potential mammoth tooth plates, but no enamel. It is 100% bone, typical of Pleistocene material that I’ve found on the Brazos River for the last 15 years. The only other thing I can possibly think of as an ID is tortoise shell, but there are no sutures to indicate that

Looking for some help to try and id this tooth I found along the St. Marys River in southern Georgia/ Northern Florida yesterday. My initial thought was a proboscidean milk tooth but after reviewing similar specimens from previous posts I believe it could just as well be dugongid@Harry Pristis and @Shellseeker have both posted excellent photos of both, but I just can’t seem to decide. Are there any distinguishing characteristics in the photos I posted that will allow one to say with some degree of certainty which one it is ? The tooth measures 25mm X 15mm. The low ridge shown in the first picture is not a feature I can find in any dugong tooth pictures. Many thanks !

Was back out at the Peace River yesterday for only my third visit this season. Water levels and flow are reasonable at this point, although pulling up a shovel of matrix in the middle of the river still has quite a bit washed off. This time I was on the water by 7:30 am and headed up stream to a spot I have hunted often in past years. I was curious as to what changes the hurricane might have caused. I was pleasantly surprised! Last year water flow in this area was significantly restricted because of debris and it had turned into a stagnant pool. It was frustrating because in prior years I had pulled mammoth and mastodon teeth, tusk pieces and many large proboscidean leg and foot bones from the water. No finds in this spot last season. Yesterday was a different story. With the water flow restored the area had cleaned out nicely. I was able to target a prime spot from years past and after about 15 minutes of probing struck something solid about 4" to 5" below sand. I have made the mistake previously of being too aggressive with my probe and shovel and breaking pieces while trying to retrieve them. So, I went in with barehands, the water level was just low enough that I could reach the bottom and dig. It took a while to scoop away enough sand to loosen the large piece. Along the way I scooped up two additional smaller pieces. This was exciting as I was sure these first pieces were bone from a large mammal. The sand finally gave way and I pulled up a large, heavy bone that I am, sure is proboscidean. And here are all three: The large bone is easily 14" x 6" overall and I am thinking tibia/fibia. Upon getting these washed off it appears the smaller two could be a pair. Of what, I don't know. They hint toward patella for me. That was it for my scouting the old site. I had promised to meet a friend farther south on the river after my early hunt. He lives farther from the river and usually arrives 30 to 45 minutes after I do. Found him digging a new spot and he encouraged me to join him there as the gravel was thick and large. I agreed and as I pulled my second shovel of matrix from the water I saw a near perfect 1.75" Meg sitting in the shovel. This was turning out to be a great day. I later pulled up a 2" Meg a bit more worn, but still a keeper! A set of deer teeth, many more additional shark teeth and ,miscellaneous bones rounded out the day. Here's the Megs: I titled this report River Visit & Side Trip because today after running an errand I stopped by a land site I had pulled a good sized baleen whale vert from in Sept 2021. I figured maybe the hurricane had worked its magic here too. I discovered it had! Within minutes I spotted this sticking out of the ground - I hadn't planned on this stop when I left the house so my only option to get it out was the tire iron from my car. As I started to clear away the matrix I spotted another piece seen in the right of this photo - Here are both pieces fresh out of the ground - Another Baleen Whale Vert 5" long x 4 1/2" in circumference. The smaller piece is a section that came off the larger piece. It was that missing part that helped me spot it as in the first three photos you can see the dark shaded area. It looked like someone may have driven over it recently breaking that piece off. It was a good a two days. I am so motivated I will be returning to the Peace River tomorrow!!

I was able to go on a short hunt with my son and his girlfriend on the Brazos river Easter Sunday. The water had dropped a few inches and exposed a little bit more gravel that I had not been able to hunt yet. The first find of the day was a very nice sloth phalanx. On the way back I waited through the water and almost tripped over the second find. I thought it could’ve been a log. It was in about a foot of water and hard to see. The only part visible was the curve which made me think it could be a bone. I reached into the water and dug around the perimeter of the piece and was finally able to bring it out of the mud. I was very excited to see that it is a chunk of a large proboscidean bone. Using the great resource that @Brandy Cole provided I think a possible id is mammoth/mastodon right proximal tibia. Here’s the link to the sight again that Brandy provided(I couldn’t locate it and had to ask her for it). The 3rd pic is a left tibia that I am showing to compare my find.

Had some productive hunting and found this in a gravel bar. I'm hoping I've found my first gomphothere or mastodon tooth! Or at least a part of one. I've looked at several threads about differentiating them, but I still had a hard time identifying this for certain. Am I headed in the right direction or could it be something else? It does look smaller than I would have expected. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Found in South Texas. I still have a hard time distinguishing between more rounded proboscidean bones, even after looking at the University of Michigan's excellent mastodon examples. I think this one best resembles a patella, but I'm unsure

i want to have an idea of how much tooth is missing from this partial one and if it's a fairly standard size in terms of width. normally the ridges look closer together in other stegodon teeth i've seen. are there any visual ways of getting an idea of how old it is? (wasnt sure where to put this question, sorry)

So over the past couple of posts, i have focused on the individual bones that I have found in the overburden dig site at my plant. One spot in particular has continuously been a gold mine, and have lovingly called my Proboscidean site, after the Proboscidean scapula fragments I first found there. Over the course of 14 months (4 to 6 hours per month) I have dug up more and more fragments of different bones that eventually piece together, but now i have started to find bones of other animals. With all this I have started to wonder if there is some bigger picture I am missing trying to ID each bone separately, or did we just hit a former sinkhole when digging up the overburden, and i am just finding everything that fell/washed in?

Reading an ID topic today by none other than @Ruger9a I was realizing how little love the herbivore teeth get sometimes. Personally I love herbivore teeth, especially proboscideans (although I don't have many). So I thought I'd start a topic to show off your underappreciated plant eaters. Note: all herbivores are welcome, not just proboscideans, and not just mammals. Have fun with it!

I’m fairly certain this is a piece off a large bone from a mammoth or mastodon. Can anyone recognize what bone it’s from? Pelvis??

Found on the Brazos River in Texas in Pleistocene gravels. Any thoughts?

I almost tripped over this log today while out on the Brazos River. So my question is...Is there a way to differentiate mammoth femur from mastodon femur. I can post more pics after I clean it up a bit. Right now all I know is that it weighs 52lbs, 17 inches wide and 30 inches long. It was fun carrying up the bank and back to my car. And wondering if I would dive in after it if I swamped the kayak on the trip back.....

I found this several months ago on the Brazos River, Texas. The articulating surface measures about 7 x 8 inches. I'm thinking it's a chunk of proboscidean pelvis. I also considered scapula, but leaning toward pelvis. Also, any way to differentiate between mammoth and mastodon? Thanks!

My wife and I managed to make one last trip to the Peace River on the last weekend of 2013 to see if the river had any belated Christmas presents for us. We worked a bit further upstream from where we normally hunt and were rewarded with some nice finds for our efforts. It was overcast and the temps were in the upper 70s so the conditions were perfect for two long days of shoveling and sifting. I've been in the river in March when the (air) temps barely broke 50 and standing in the water all day took perseverance (and a smidgen of insanity). I've also been hunting toward the end of the dry season in late May or June when you seem to spend most of your time re-applying sunscreen and hydrating yourself so you won't pass out and risk becoming part of the fossil fauna in the future. This weekend, though, was quite pleasant (I did get sprinkled upon several times on Sunday but as I was half submerged it really didn't matter much). The largest find of the day was huge vertebra which I'm thinking might be proboscidean rather than cetacean. At roughly 5"x4.5" by about 3" thick all I know is that it came from something bigger than a bread box. We found lots of small fragments of mammoth tooth in the area but I hesitate to say that any of that is associated in any way with the vertebra. I'm hoping some experts here on the forum might steer me in the appropriate direction for a possible ID on this monster paper weight. One of the things I love about spending a weekend wading through the Peace River sifting through the gravel is that you never know what you will find. The fact that the sea level has changed through the ages means that the Bone Valley fossil bed region has repeatedly been: a high and dry plain inhabited by large mammals, a swampy wetland with its accompanying gators and turtles, and a shallow marine environment with dugongs and fishes (including many shark species, most notably the megalodon). Because you are sifting through gravel from beds that have mixed fossils from all these different ages means that you can pull a smorgasbord assortment of fossils from all these time periods in a single sifting screen. This unpredictability is a major part of the charm for me and a large part of the reason the river calls to me in the dry season when conditions are right. We scored pretty well on the mammal front this time. In addition to the huge vertebra we found what appears to be a deer astragalus (ankle bone) as well as some pieces of what look like deer antler. We had many fragments of different species of horse molar but as I have a few nice specimens already in my collection I tend to leave these behind. We did find one molar that was mostly intact which I kept mainly for this trip report. We scored nicely on horse incisors this time adding a few nice specimens to my collection. Another small fragment we kept just to see if we could identify it is likely part of a bison or camel molar but we may never get a confirmed ID on such a small piece. The mammal tooth of the day though was a sloth molar (the first identifiable sloth fossil we've ever found). This was found a few minutes after the giant vertebra and soon eclipsed that find (bigger is not always better). In addition to the mammals we scored some nice gator teeth including a large stout one measuring about 1.25" in length. There were lots of pieces of turtle carapace that came up in our sifting screen but I've only kept in my collection a few distinctive pieces that you can show to somebody and they can immediately identify as turtle shell. The ones we turned up are still in the river for others to try to find--catch-and-release fossil style. We did pretty good on the marine fossil front as well. In addition to the usual assortment of small (even tiny) shark teeth I did turn-up one of the smallest meg teeth I've ever found. This little guy is around 1.3" long but is a perfect little gem with nice coloration which will join the few larger teeth that I've pulled from the Peace in a place of honor among its larger kin. I've long since stopped collecting ray tooth plates and tail barbs (unless they are nicely preserved intact specimens) but I have a fondness for the dermal scutes/denticles (spines or thorns). We found two interestingly shaped ones on this trip. I saved a couple of pufferfish mouth plates as they were reasonably intact as well as a nice fish bone and (sadly) a partial fish vertebra. I also kept what appears to be a partial sawfish rostral tooth as I don't have many of these in my collection yet. Something (hopefully) new for me on the marine front is what appears to me to be part of a crab claw tip. It has a rough surface and a slightly hooked tip but as I haven't seen one up close before this may be the result of an overactive imagination. All in all a great way to end 2013 and though the year is almost over the fossil hunting season is just getting underway on the Peace River. I've been lurking on this forum for some time, drooling over the trip reports of others and trying to learn about fossils from the posts on this forum and I thought it high time I joined the fray and posted something of my own. Cheers. -Ken