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This bone fragment was collected on the beach at Beaumaris in Victoria, Australia. The site is latest Miocene to earliest Pliocene in age (5 - 6 million years old) and consists of the Beaumaris Sandstone formation. Fossils of bony fish, sharks, whales, dolphins, seals, penguins, flying birds and terrestrial marsupials are all known from the location. This PDF gives a great overview of the Beaumaris fauna for those that are unfamiliar with it: http://www.marinecare.org.au/images/Fossils_of_Beaumaris_Feb_2015.pdf I am thinking possibly some kind of jaw fragment just based on the shape, but from what i am not sure. The best match i can see in the document above is the base of the Albatross beak on page 13, but i am not holding my breath on that one. There is dark coloured bone along the edges on both side faces, separated by sediment in the middle. The sediment gap between the bone is larger on one side than the other. The whole piece measures 30mm long, stands almost 20mm tall and is 20mm wide at the widest end. Any ideas?

This shark tooth was found on the foreshore at Beaumaris in Victoria, Australia. It is 5-6 million years old. I am confident it is a mako shark tooth but i am trying to decide which species to label it. The following shark taxa are listed in the fauna found at this location: Heterodontus cainozoicus, Carcharias taurus, Carcharodon megalodon, Parotodus benedeni, Isurus desori, Isurus oxyrinchus, Isurus hastalis, Isurus retroflexus, Lamna?, Megascyliorhinus sp., Carcharhinus cf. brachyurus, Carcharhinus sp., Galeocerdo aduncus The majority of teeth at the site are from Carcharodon hastalis (or Isurus hastalis depending on who you believe). However i feel like my tooth is too narrow to be a C. hastalis tooth. Even the first lower anteriors of C. hastalis that i have seen are somewhat proportionally wider than my example, hence why i am leaning towards one of the other species of mako but i want to know what the shark tooth experts on this forum think. I had a look in the book 'Vertebrate Palaeontology of Australasia' (which has a nice section on fossil chondrichthyans) and the closest match i could see was a first lower anterior tooth from Isurus paucus (tooth A on page 552 if anyone has the book) but this species isn't listed in the fauna for Beaumaris. Might it instead be an Isurus oxyrinchus or desori tooth? Additionally my tooth is fairly straight, and most of the other mako specimens i am seeing are more curved. It measures 24 mm long and 11 mm wide.

G'day all! I have just returned from a three day collecting trip to Beaumaris, a coastal suburb of Melbourne in Australia. This report acts as a pictorial overview of the trip and provides an insight into what collecting at this beach location is like. A similar trip was undertaken by@digit late last year (http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/70070-quick-trip-to-beaumaris-cliffs-australia/). I too had previously spent two days at this location in early 2016, during my first Victorian fossil hunting trip. Pictures of the finds from that trip can be found in this thread: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/61248-fossil-hunting-holiday-in-victoria-australia-dec-2015-jan-2016/ I decided to return to Beaumaris for a second time as i haven't been collecting for quite some time and i wanted to find more vertebrate material from this location, as i knew the potential that the site possesses and didn't manage to do it enough justice on my first trip here. All of these finds were collected on the shore across the three days that i spent here from the 14th through to the 16th of February. I spent most of that time rummaging on hands and knees in the beach shingle near the Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron. As mentioned my main goal was to collect vertebrate material and i was especially interested in finding shark teeth. The fossils come from the Beaumaris Sandstone formation and are between 5 and 6 million years old (latest Miocene or earliest Pliocene). Most of the vertebrate material is derived from a phosphatic nodule bed at the base of this formation, just above the unit contact with the underlying Gellibrand Marl. This nodule bed outcrops only at the very base of the cliffs and on the shore platform which is normally covered by the sea except at low tide. Because i was collecting loose material from the beach shingle a lot of the bones and teeth are heavily worn and fragmentary, but they are still very cool! Beaumaris is highly significant as it is one of the only places in Australia where you get fossils of both marine and terrestrial animals from this period of time, capturing a snapshot of almost the entire ecosystem from fish, birds and mammals to corals, gastropods, echinoids and many others. It is also one of the only places where you can collect vertebrate fossils so close to a major Australian city (only about 30 minutes drive from the centre of Melbourne). The Location: Fossil bones in-situ and in my hand (these are most likely from whales): Many more pictures still to come!

Just a bit of interesting news from our part of the world.... http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/scratch-marks-in-a-wa-cave-show-the-drop-bear-thylacoleo-carnifex-could-climb-particularly-well/news-story/5f6af36d077aa792e55239c41a814ecd It's a rare glimpse into the behaviour of an extinct animal rather than just the biology of one (plus I was down in that cave at the time so I have a personal bias towards this news ). edit: link to the paper- http://www.nature.com/articles/srep21372