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Oxford clay teeth ID help please


DD95

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Hello, this is my first post on the forum so firstly I apologise if I have done anything wrong. I brought these teeth a number of years ago and have only just got round to sorting them out. The first one was listed as Jurassic crocodile tooth and the second as Jurassic Plesiosaur tooth, they both come from the Oxford clay around Peterborough. I would really like to put a species name to these teeth if possible so any help would be greatly appreciated. My initial thoughts were Metriorhynchus for the crocodile tooth and Cryptoclidus for the Plesiosaur but I am a complete amateur and would love some help from professionals. Finding information online about the Oxford clay seems to be very difficult. Thanks in advance for your help.

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Thank you for your replies, i hadn’t considered an Ichthyosaur although I thought the only Ichthyosaur from the Oxford clay was Ophthalmosaurus which has very small teeth, I may be wrong though.

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2 hours ago, Pterygotus said:

Gives off more of a plesiosaur vibe to me :zzzzscratchchin:

I don't believe the striations match up with that ID @Pterygotus, unless I haven't heard of the species which you have in mind.

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3 minutes ago, fossil_sea_urchin said:

I don't believe the striations match up with that ID @Pterygotus, unless I haven't heard of the species which you have in mind.

Sorry I was referring to the 2nd tooth. The species I had in mind was cryptoclidus because it is the plesiosaur most often seen from the oxford clay while most the other species seem to be rare.

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  • 11 months later...

I know this is an old one, but I'm afraid the photographs of the teeth are simply not good enough to tell...

 

The first looks most like a teleosaurid crocodile tooth, as it has fine striations running almost entirely up to the tooth apex, and I think I see a carina. However, as it's unclear whether the striations actually do reach the tooth apex (it would appear they do not) and I might misread there being a carina, the tooth could well be ophthalmosaurid - though in that case, the striations seem rather thinner than you'd expect the enamel folds of plicidentine to be. This still leaves Pliosaur as an option, though to confirm that, I'd need to see other sides of the tooth as well. Anyway, crocodile sounds like it could be a match.

 

As to the second tooth, it's very well possible that this is indeed a plesiosaur tooth. However, here again, I'd need to see the tooth from further angles to be able to tell whether the tooth has carinae and the way the striations are laid out. Damaged as it is, it's currently very difficult to make out both it's original shape and presence or absence of carinae.

'There's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone' -- Terry Pratchett

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