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This is a Mosasaur Jaw for sale on an auction site, and these are the only photos provided. Does it look authentic?

 

 

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Really fake. Like said above, the teeth are real but the rest is all sand and plaster. 

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8 minutes ago, JohnJ said:

No.  The tooth crowns are real.

Check this out.

 

3 minutes ago, Praefectus said:

Really fake. Like said above, the teeth are real but the rest is all sand and plaster. 

Yikes. The price seemed comically low to me, and I knew it was for a reason. Thank you both.

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Yes, they mass produce these here in Morocco. 

I have seen thousands of 'em. 

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Life's Good!

Tortoise Friend.

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As the others have said. This is a common fake.
 

These are made by the thousands and all look almost identical. They use local sand/rock and random pieces of bone as well as real mosasaur teeth and put these all together with glue. So the materials generally look roughly correct. But when you look closely you'll see that especially the "jaw" part has no detail at all and often it's visible where two random pieces of bone meet and have glue an sand between them. The jaws also look way too symmetrical. Nothing in nature looks this neat. But then when you look at the teeth, while real don't match at all. It's a mismatch of different sizes of mosasaur teeth from different animals and often from different species.

 

- Real fossils most often aren't as neat as this. Bones will be jumbled together.

- The teeth don't match eachother

- The matrix is too neat and clean. Real pieces of matrix with these types of bones in them will often have all sorts of little bits in them. It's very common to see loads of fish bones right next to mosasaur jaws as well.

- There is no anatomical detail on the jaws. They just look like blobs. Real jaws will have details and shapes that will make them stand out. Things like the nutrient holes on the outside of the jaw right above the tooth row is one of the more obvious things you'd see on real jaws.

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Olof Moleman AKA Lord Trilobite

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