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Quite regularly, questions turn up about the authenticity of Keichosaurus fossil specimens. Until now, most, if not all, were natural, but mostly just very poorly prepped. Would you like to show off "real" fakes, casts or replicas of Keichosaurus? I would like to get a feeling for them, at least from pics. If there already exists such a topic somewhere else in the forum, please put a link in this topic. Thank you very much! Franz Bernhard

Hi all, We spent yesterday in a different section of the quarry I posted about here. This section yielded some nice fish, plants and even another temnospondyl! Phyllotheca or a different horsetail Xenacanthid pieces Various fish bits A nice nodule with a fish inside I will post some more photos of the temnospondyl once it gets excavated, but here is a loose section from the rear of the skull. After our quarry visit we went to a terrific Eocene plant locality, will post some photos from there next!

Hi everyone! I added this Nothosaurus tooth from France to the collection. Upper Muschelkalk (Triassic), about 245 million years old. Found in France in the province of Sarrebourg, department of Moselle. The tooth is 11 mm large. I would like information on how to identify it, and learn how to distinguish the species by comparing the tooth with other Nothosaur fossils found in the same area. Can Nothosaur be described as a marine reptile even though it is semi-aquatic?

Hello everyone! A couple of weeks ago, I traveled to Turimetta Beach, a Triassic fossil locality in the Sydney Basin. I found several plant fossils. Some were too fragmentary for ID, but if possible I would like to know people's opinions on the ID of these three. I've read through previous forum posts and am aware these might not be able to be ID'ed. Fossil plate which I found as a rockfall near Turimetta Headland. A relatively large stem which was found in the same rockfall. A small leaf I found at an outcrop on the beach itself. Thanks for any possible help!

Recently we had a quick exploratory trip just south of Sydney in search of Triassic fish and Tertiary leaves. Our first stop yielded a terrific but partially weathered nodule exposed in an outcrop of the Ashfield Shale. A clear layer was present in the cross section so it was likely to yield a fish! This is it after most of it was removed, unfortunately I don't have any before photos but the layer through the middle is clearly visible: Will include photos of the prep later in this post. Our next stop was the main focus of our trip but wasn't too eventful unfortunately. We drove around back roads looking for new outcrops of an unnamed Tertiary formation which sometimes yields very well preserved leaves and insects. We found a few outcrops of it but only one section of road yielded any good leaves. The site: A freshly broken rock with leaves: As soon as we got home I started on the fish nodule. The fish layer had already partially split which was helpful, but meant the inside was quite weathered and covered in calcium carbonate. Splitting the nodule carefully with a knife: A fresh split. Note the white calcium carbonate encrusting the surface: Soaking the pieces in acetic acid (8% vinegar) to dissolve away the calcium carbonate: The same piece I showed before after acid preparation, the fish are now clearly visible: Splitting the rest of the nodule: Reassembling after acid prep: The rock is a thick siderite nodule so is very heavy once all glued together. With pieces this large I usually make a spray foam cradle for the pieces to sit in, meaning I can disassemble it to move it around. Loosely assembled and starting with the spray foam: Surprisingly, this nodule ended up being packed with fish. The main large fish in the middle is likely a species of Elonichthys, but throughout the rest of the nodule are several other genera including Saurichthys, Cleithrolepis and Elpisopholis. Overall I can count just under 60 individual fish on this one rock, many are just small sections of scale pattern though. The Cleithrolepis is likely complete but sits underneath a couple of other fish, and the Saurichthys is tiny and incomplete but its long snout is unmistakable. The preservation in most of the specimens is poor, as with most other Ashfield Shale nodules, but the association of so many fish is of interest! One half of the nodule, I haven't quite finished the counterpart yet but it does have slightly better preservation. Note the partially exposed Cleithrolepis just in front of the pectoral fins of the largest fish: A small but particularly densely packed section: Will include more photos in coming days!

Can someone help me identify the tooth fossil found at Aust Cliff, Bristol, UK? According to the seller, this fossil is presumed to be a Triassic plesiosaur tooth, likely classified as a basal plesiosaur. Nevertheless, the striation pattern on the lingual side of the tooth raises doubts about whether it could also be an ichthyosaur tooth.

Hello everyone, After struggling to obtain material from the the local Triassic formations, I was fortunate enough to obtain some material from a fellow collector and friend after trading some things with him. This included not only Pekin Formation plant specimens from an inaccessible spot, but also some Cumnock Formation grey and black shales from a different site that were collected long ago. I was splitting one piece when I found this. Unfortunately, due to the age and condition of the material, whatever this is split into several fragments. I pieced together the two larger fragments with a small dab of adhesive, but I was having trouble with the smaller fragments. I could not get a good measurement of it because of this, but it is likely under 7 mm in length if it were intact, and probably around 3 mm in diameter. I have no good ideas on what it is, but it appears similar to a tooth from a undescribed Metoposaurus from the formation. I figured I would get additional opinions on it. There do not seem to be serrations on it. I apologize for a lack of pictures, the condition of the specimen made me nervous about moving it around too much. I kept the fragments of shale and coal it came from separate to look for more fragments. (Edit: I took additional photos, see my reply below - 12-7-23)

Hi, several years ago, I was hiking a canyon about 25 miles south of Moab in a broad canyon at the base of Moenkopi, Chinle (Triassic), Wingate, and a bit of Kayenta (Jurassic). I found this bone in an ephemeral stream that ran through the canyon and have been curious. Anybody have ideas? It is unlikely petrified wood which is extremely prevalent in the area.

While on a trip in NYC, I thought it would be fun to visit Old Granton Quarry as it was close to where I was staying. In the first day, I found some nice material so I returned for another ~2 hrs on the last day of the trip. Day one was in the afternoon, cloudy but without rain. Nice conditions, and I stayed exactly 2 hours. I was fortunate to visit near Christmas, and there was little vegetation to cover the cliff-face and obscure it from view. Also there was, thankfully, no poison ivy growing. On day two, I started out early, before dawn at ~06:45. It rained slightly, and throughout the dig the cliff reminded me it was there by little bits of rock falling past my head. I found a cute little Plethodon cinereus in the cliff, before dawn, that was a bit shy. Here are the finds! Dorsal fin and some scales Partial Diplurus newarki body - caudal and anal fins - and a few ribs. Skull, and dorsal fin imprint of Diplurus newarki. Concretion/nodule - possibly coprolitic in nature Diplurus newarki - disarticulated ribs, caudal, and possible skull. Diplurus fins and scales Diplurus caudal fin imprints. Disarticulated bones/fins/scales. Diplurus caudal fin Estheria ovata Diplurus ribs Estheria ovata imprints and disarticulated bones/scales. Partial skull and ribs of Diplurus. (Possible ray finned fish scales.) Diplurus 1st dorsal fin Possible skull, or coprolitic material. Concretion nodule imprint: Probably coprolite/concretion/nodule. Could be some bone in there, as well. Diplurus caudals, scales. Possible Diplurus scales Possible Diplurus skull, and scales/disarticulated bones.

Going through some rocks collected in one of the triassic basins of the Newark supergroup in Virginia, and this popped out. Length is 5/8 inch, width is 1/8 inch. It looks toothy to me… any ideas?

Hi everyone! I recently uploaded a pair of expedition videos to YouTube from my September trip to some late Triassic beds in northern Arizona. If you're an old school Walking With Dinosaurs fan, you may be interested to know that this spot is quite close geographically to the famed Placerias Quarry whose fossils were hugely influential in the making of Episode 1, "New Blood". I, and I suspect many of you as well, found WWD and its spinoffs to be easily the most captivating natural history documentaries of their time, and I credit its opening act taking place in my home state as playing an influential role in why I ended up in this field of study. I spend more of my time these days working in Cretaceous rocks than anything else, so coming back to the Triassic is something of a homecoming for me. Fossils at this locality are abundant but frequently in rough shape, since they begin to erode and fragment while still several inches below the surface. Teeth, like the phytosaur crown above, hold up better and are usually among the best finds of each trip. I also collected some fragments of metoposaur skull or clavicle (watch the second video in particular if you're interested in these guys!) but I will hold off until I've finished gluing the pieces together before sharing here. 😉 While large stretches of Chinle beds in northern Arizona are now federally protected under Petrified Forest National Park, these protected areas do not extend over the entirety of Arizona's late Triassic province. A short walk away from where I collected fossils is this massive excavated pit that has cut down through the fossil-bearing layers. This burial site of over 200 million years will soon become a landfill for human waste. I think this is an important reminder of why we collect fossils in the first place: 'everything not saved will be lost'.

Hi, this one looks a little too good for the price. It is apparently Barasaurus Besairiei Permian and from Madagascar. What do you thinnk?

I found a new track area. Not great tracks but definitely tridactyl tracks! Chirothere and rotodactylus also so far. This must be Chinle Formation. The article on my trackway is due in January.

Hi all, Some time ago I found this shell in (what I believe to be) the French Upper Muschelkalk (Triassic). Now I'm not into shells myself, but to judge from the remains of operculum on the underside of it, the specimen concerns an oyster. Most strikingly, however, the shell has a pattern of darker-coloured lines that do not correspond to any three-dimensional/elevational differences on the shell surface - which is, in fact, entirely flat. I haven't seen this on a fossil shell before. Now when doing a Google search for my response on whether it would be possible for crustacean carapaces to retain traces of their original colour, I bumped into an article that described that molluscs may incorporate melanin in the calcite of their shells to create the colour patterns we see (e.g., here). This got me wondering: could the lines I'm seeing indeed be traces of the original melanin pigmentation of this shell? And, if so, how common is this phenomenon? Does anybody else have examples of such shells? I'd also be very happy if someone could furnish me with a genus or species name to go with my specimen. But here I'd like to primarily raise the topic of ancient colour reconstruction in shells.

The Ctenacanthiform Sharks are perhaps one of the most famous, yet enigmatic groups of sharks currently known, with a fossil range stretching from the Early Devonian to the Early Cretaceous periods 407.6-136.4 Million Years ago and with a range that spans globally. The most enigmatic along with the most famous genus of Ctenacanthiform (as well as one of my personal favorites) is the genus Saivodus, which was only described properly in 2006 after its fossilized remains were mistaken for two centuries as remains of species belonging to two other Ctenacanthiform genus, Ctenacanthus and Cladodus. The genus Saivodus emerged during the Early Carboniferous 360.7-345.3 Million Years ago and included the largest currently known species of Ctenacanthiformes, the Carboniferous Saivodus striatus that grew up to 35 feet in length fully grown. Despite large numbers of teeth and even very well preserved fossilized remains of the head including jaws and fins from large Saivodus striatus specimens being discovered and described, still very little is known about the overall paleoecology of these enigmatic sharks. Artist reconstruction of an Adult Saivodus striatus and its size compared to an adult Human and adult Great White Shark (Carcharodon carcharias) by artist HodariNundu. Image Source: https://www.deviantart.com/hodarinundu/art/Super-Sized-Saivodus-866628428 https://paleobiodb.org/classic/basicCollectionSearch?collection_no=84108&is_real_user=1 The latest record of the genus Saivodus was believed for a few years to be fossils of a small Saivodus sp. from the Fossil Mountain Member of the Kaibab Formation dating to the Kungurian stage of the Permian period 279.3-272.3 Million Years ago in what is now Kachina Village of the U.S. State of Arizona. Hodnett, J. P. M., Elliott, D. K., Olson, T. J., & Wittke J. H. Ctenacanthiform sharks from the Permian Kaibab Formation, northern Arizona. Historical Biology, (2012). 24. 381-395. Retrieved December 16, 2023, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254237970_Ctenacanthiform_sharks_from_the_Permian_Kaibab_Formation_northern_Arizona https://paleobiodb.org/classic/basicCollectionSearch?collection_no=132088&is_real_user=1 However, I just found a confirmed (until recently overlooked) record of the genus Saivodus with the assistance of a recent well researched paper on Ctenacanthiform diversity that extends the geological range of genus by around 25.1-20.1 Million Years. I think you’ll all find this record extremely interesting!!! A Ctenacanthiform tooth were found in 1970 in deposits of the Zewan Formation dating to the Changhsingian stage of the Permian period 254.2-252.2 Million Years ago in what is Guryul Ravine of the region of Kashmir, a disputed territory located at the northernmost point of the Indian Subcontinent of South Asia). This tooth were initially described in 1971 by Paleontologists from Kyoto University, Japan as belonging to a new species of Ctenacanthus, (Ctenacanthus ishii). The size of the tooth is the following: Length of the base of tooth specimen - 16 mm. (1.60 cm.) Width of of the tooth's base - 6 mm. (0.60 cm.) Length/height of each of the tooth's two largest subsidiary or lateral cusps on each side of the tooth - 3.5 mm. (0.35 cm.) Length/height from the base of the tooth's apex to the top of the tooth's central/medial cusp - 8 mm. (0.80 cm.) Photographs of the Kashmir Saivodus sp. tooth specimen from the Permian-Triassic Zewan Formation, Kashmir, Asia. Image Source: https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/186572/1/mfskugm 038001_163.pdf However, further analysis of the Kashmir specimen in 2021 (including the general tooth shape and morphology) has confirmed the Kashmir tooth is in fact the latest geological record of the Saivodus genus currently known. Kapoor, H. M,, and Sahni, A. A Shark Tooth from Zewan Series of Guryul Ravine, Kashmir. Memoirs of the Faculty of Science, Kyoto University. Series of Geology and Mineralogy, (1971). 38(1), 163-166. Retrieved December 16, 2023, from https://repository.kulib.kyoto-u.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/2433/186572/1/mfskugm 038001_163.pdf Shah, I. K., Farooq, M., Meraj, G., et al. Geological treasure of Guryul ravine section in Kashmir Himalaya - a case report. ESS Open Archive. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/essoar.10510303.1 https://d197for5662m48.cloudfront.net/documents/publicationstatus/75277/preprint_pdf/7673ce9d023bd875199a50b14e3f42e7.pdf Feichtinger, I., Ivanov, A. O., Winkler, V., Dojen, C., Kindlimann, R., Kriwet, J., Pfaff, C., Schraut, G., & Stumpf, S. Scarce ctenacanthiform sharks from the Mississippian of austria with an analysis of carboniferous elasmobranch diversity in response to climatic and environmental changes. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, (2021). 41(2). https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2021.1925902 Not only does this expand the geologic range of Saivodus and is the first confirmed record of this genus from Asia, but the proximity the Kashmir specimen was collected to the location of the Permian-Triassic boundary at the Zewan Formation (only 3 meters away from the geologic boundary) could indicate small to medium species of the genus Saivodus survived the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event 252 Million Years ago and survived (albeit very briefly) into the Early Triassic. This is a major discovery in the study of Ctenacanthiform sharks. Hopefully more specimens of Ctenacanthiform sharks from Permian-Triassic deposits in Kashmir, Pakistan, India, and around the world could be uncovered, studied, and described soon so that we may all get a more accurate understanding of the paleobiology and paleoecology of these amazing prehistoric sharks. This will also give us a more accurate understanding of the fascinating time they lived before one of Earth’s largest mass extinction events along with the period of biological and ecosystem recovery afterwards.

Hello, just recently I did my first fossil hunting at Turimetta Beach Sydney around the exposure of Triassic shale. I found a nice dicroidium fossil I think (after seeing some similar posts from this location) and two more which I'm unsure of the species (picture below and sorry one is without scale). Any ideas would be appreciated of what species or plant group these two fossils are from which look very much like a leaf or stem stem structure. Thanks!

What came first: birds or bird like tracks? @Auspex Birdlike tracks predate birds by 50 million years. https://www.sciencealert.com/mysterious-bird-like-footprints-in-africa-predate-the-existence-of-birds https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293021 Abrahams M, Bordy EM (2023) The oldest fossil bird-like footprints from the upper Triassic of southern Africa. PLoS ONE 18(11): e0293021. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0293021

Found this on the surface in a small area of exposed layered greenish and purple decomposing sedimentary rock at the base of Comb Wash west of Blanding, Utah. The layers of rock were below a steep cliff and of Wingate sandstone and I assume the time period to be Triassic but I could be off by a few hundred million years. The fossil is a clump of round nodules approximately 5mm in diameter. They have raised lines separating the balls. It could be a clump of seeds compacted in a dinosaur's gut and defecated or maybe fossilized soft tissue like lung alveoli. Thoughts and questions are very much welcome!

Hello, I'm simply looking to buy a phytosaur tooth and I was wondering if it's authentic. The pictured tooth is from the Redonda Formation of New Mexico and Triassic in age. Thank you.

We were recently granted access to a terrific site south of Sydney. This quarry extracts Ashfield Shale for the manufacturing of bricks and has been operating for many decades, some fossils from here housed in the Australian Museum were collected in the 1960s. To my knowledge, nobody has collected here for quite a long time, so we were excited to have a look! The area is mapped as Bringelly Shale, but I think the lower section of the pit is actually Ashfield Shale. The upper section of the pit is a finely bedded sandstone and shale rather than the black shale characteristic of the Ashfield Shale. Our focus was in this lower black shale where we looked for ironstone nodules which can contain fish, temnospondyl amphibians, sharks, bivalves, etc. Here is a nodule where the cross section of a fish can be seen (the thin line just above my pick): As can be seen in this photo, the pit is huge! Much more of it is out of view. My dad and some cars in the background for reference. The back section of the quarry was actively being worked so a lot of fresh and unweathered shale was exposed. This made it hard to spot the nodules we were after since they often split through the middle and blend in with the surrounding shale. Our best luck was in a section alongside the road where a huge wall of shale was presumably exposed many decades ago, allowing the shale to weather away leaving protruding nodules. Unfortunately, many of the nodules had been split through the middle and broken up. Extracting these nodules from the sheer rock face was very difficult! Fortunately, the quarry manager was super generous and helped us remove some with an excavator. The next problem was actually removing the nodules in one piece. They aren't like the beautiful ammonite nodules found on the Jurassic Coast, these are filled with vertical fractures and are a nightmare to remove and split open, even when unweathered. A real nightmare to work with! This rock face yielded some great finds. Lots of smaller nodules contained fish, but one contained a xenacanthid shark and two contained temnospondyl amphibians! The xenacanthid nodule was already mostly gone (probably for many decades) but the characteristic spines and cartilage texture was unmistakeable. Xenacanthid bits: One of the temnospondyl skulls freshly cracked open. This specimen and the other temnospondyl skull are at the Australian Museum currently, will prepare them soon! On our next visit (yestderday) we came much better prepared. We hired a jackhammer which made short work of the shale, much better than scraping away the surface with the bucket of an excavator. Here is dad working on exposing the rest of one of the temnospondyl nodules (note the markings to help us put it back together when it inevitably broke during the extraction): Here is the same nodule BEFORE we started with the jackhammer (photo taken on the first visit)! Once we got that nodule out, we had a bit of spare time before we had to leave. I had a look in the freshly dug section of the quarry for any nodules we might've missed and found nothing of much interest other than a nodule containing a bivalve coquina. That was until I noticed one more tiny nodule, which was empty. But upon exposing the surrounding shale I noticed some fish! This is highly unusual considering that most of the vertebrate fossils here are found in nodules. The small section of shale I exposed had quite a few fish, all stacked on top of each other. In the same chunk of shale was also a few horsetail stems and a (conifer?) cone. Here are some in-situ photos of the fish and some after I put them back together at home. The shale is very fragmentary so it was difficult to extract them. Will update soon with better photos of some of our finds!

Hello! I asked this question in the Facebook group so I apologize if any of you are seeing it for a second time, but it was buried in a comment chain so I’m hoping to get a few more expert eyes on it. I received this beautifully prepared Keichousaurus today and it’s truly awesome to see it in person, but now that I’m able to inspect it more closely I’m thinking it may be a composite. There are a few things making me lean that direction: 1) There is an obvious mismatch in the patterns on the matrix, both front and back, when comparing the chunk that the body is on to the chunk that the skull is on. For example, the partial fish fossil on the righthand side just abruptly stops at the seam (last photo, blue arrow) … but it’s maybe possible that this is due to variable flaking/weathering and reattachment 2) The head is dorsal while the body is ventral … but I know it’s possible for this to happen naturally if the neck is twisted 3) The white “veins” that appear to run across both plates (skull and body) are, I think, true calcite veins in one plate and scratches intentionally placed to match on the other. For example, the red arrow in the last photo points to a junction where a true calcite vein from the body plate should cross the skull, but no vein is visible in the skull. A “vein” reappears above the skull but I believe this is just a surface scratch. On the other hand, the skull is perfectly sized and aligned to the “horns” (retroarticular processes) present on the body plate. This seems incredibly difficult to achieve in a fossil of this size. This specimen was prepared in the US and I have no reason to believe the skull is fake, but the uniform spacing and shape of the teeth also looks off to me. That may just be due to incomplete preparation of the area, I can’t tell even under 10x magnification. In any case it’s beautiful to look at, I was just a little disappointed to see that it may be a composite. What are your thoughts?

Hello everyone, this specimen has been advertised as a phytosaur scute from the Triassic of Northeastern Arizona. I'm curious if this piece is genuine and unmodified as it is relatively cheap. I'm also wondering if it isn't metoposaur scute as I've not seen a phytosaur scute like this. As always, any help is appreciate, thank you.