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Found this while looking for shark teeth in the surf. I thought maybe it was a type of coral, but I think it is a tooth? I found Rock Fish teeth online but those were rounded and smooth. On the top side it reminds me of a molar, and the under side looks rather like the bottom of a mushroom cap with the stipe removed. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Over a month ago I mentioned the opportunity to volunteer for a dig with the Florida Museum of Natural History (FLMNH). In addition to the Thomas Farm sinkhole locality, this year a new opportunity opened up on a small-scale sand mining operation on private property. Some interesting bones were uncovered and the university's vertebrate paleontology department was called to come have a look. They did some initial digging and uncovered rhino and Gomphothere bones with some of them partially articulated. This sounded exciting enough for me to check into. Here's the link to the earlier posting just in case this excitement is infectious: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/60662-volunteer-opportunities-with-the-flmnh/ My wife Tammy and I had planned on going in mid-March but a scheduling conflict for the weekend we'd chosen made us move it up a few weeks. They did most Saturdays but not every Sunday and we wanted to make best use of the weekend so we chose the 4-day block of time from March 3-6. We drove up from South Florida the night before and booked into our hotel in Ocala. Following the well-written directions from Dr. Richard Hulbert, we found the quarry and joined the volunteer team precisely at the appointed time of 10:00am (they work from 10:00am-4:30pm). We were introduced to the layout of the site and picked up our tools: flat-blade screwdriver, small trowel, pill jar for small finds, small plastic bags for finds that come out in pieces (to facilitate reassembly), and a larger bag to contain all of our finds. We decided to work together on a single square meter of the plot and so Dr. Hulbert found us a grid square where we had room to work from both sides. It was a square that was partially leveled and our job was to complete the leveling and recover whatever fossils lay within. Some of the other squares had interesting finds visible in them. One had a plaster-jacketed partial alligator skeleton (with skull) and another that was being worked on had Gomphothere (shovel-tusker elephant relative) bones including several associated ribs. The area we were digging in had been turning up lots of snapping turtle remains and as we progressed in our grid square we found more. Here's a look at the work site:

One of my favorite fossils are dermal denticles. Generally they come in small packages. I usually go long periods without finding any, but picked up 2 on a trip last week. The 1st photo is what I normally identify as a Stingray Dermal Denticle, with a "key" in the middle of a round or oval button. The 2nd photo "looks" different. Can it be a denticle from a different body location on the same species? Have others found similar looking denticles in SE US? I think this one is a Rorschach test. Possibly a crab nebula or a Sumo Wrestler holding his arms high in victory or salutation.