PG county (again)

[Fossil_Adult]

Ok I know I promised y’all some dinosaurs from Maryland. So here I go. I’ve seen a lot of posts lately about the Arundel formation and I’m glad that people are knowledgeable about Maryland’s past. Everyone wants to talk about Calvert cliffs and the stuff coming out of there and that’s great but it’s so rare to see someone talking about the dinosaurs that roamed Maryland 110 million years ago. Anyways, the amount of fossils I’ve found here is astounding, which is why this is going to be a long post. My finds from this area include petrified wood, plant material, dinosaur footprints, and dinosaur bone chunks. A lot of people have said they’ve found bones here, but most of the time it’s really not. I however believe that based on other fossils in my collection, the bones from here look and act fairly similar. On one of these pieces, it has that ceramic ping that is a good tell tale for bone. But anyways, here’s all the stuff found over the course of 6 months hunting this place. It includes one nodrosaur footprint (from the looks of other footprints online) a lot of petrified wood, and chunks of bone, I think the bone that’s the most detailed may be a shell of a tortoise or turtle, but anyone with differing opinions can weigh in. Anyways, I’ll definitely be going back to this spot in the hopes of finding a dinosaur tooth.

[jpc]

most of these do not seem to be bone.  But are the second through fourth picture of the same piece.  That one looks more bone-ish than the others.  

[Pemphix]

Imho Rocks, no bone. Maybe some pieces of slag.

Second one might be weathered piece of pyrite/markasit.

Keep on searching !

[Fossil_Adult]

Slag like iron? It’s not metallic at all

[Mark Kmiecik]

Slag is the stony waste matter separated from metals during the smelting or refining of ore. It is not the metal itself, which may be present in some degree. Most of these specimens look to be of geologic origin to me, but a couple of them are difficult to call either way from the photos available. 

 

[Fossil_Adult]

Hm that’s an intresting thought. Could that happen naturally?

[Mark Kmiecik]

12 minutes ago, Fossil_teenager said:

Hm that’s an intresting thought. Could that happen naturally?

Yes. And no. And maybe, but not quite. Things get hot when igneous rock is formed, but the end result is not quite what you'd use to build a locomotive or the aluminum can your soda occupies. Pick up some "intro to geology" books. How rocks happen can be fascinating. In the smelting process things are separated from each other, as opposed to nature where most of the time they become "blended". Some metals are separated in nature but are still relatively impure. Smelting is the process that removes those impurities. Slag is what is left over from that process that is primarily not metal.

[Fossil_Adult]

Its makes a weird noise when I tap it on something hard. But yea geologic things aren't really my huge expertise yet I'll look into that too.

[Jeffrey P]

FYI we find a lot of ironstone concretions in the Cretaceous deposits in Central New Jersey along with occasional actual reptile and fishbone material. You have to go through a lot of non fossil material to find the actual fossils (which by the way- except for shark teeth are often tough to spot). 

[Fossil_Adult]

You think my bone may be concretionary? because it acts like a normal fossil bone.