New member fossil ID

[Earendil]

Hello Everyone,

 

I am a new member on fossil forum! However, I am not new to paleontology. I am 13 and have been obsessed with fossils since before I could walk. I have two fossils I need identified, the first one is a jawbone I bought at a sale from a private collector. I recognize that it is probably not valuable, but I would like it identified. The man who sold it (he was a naturalist) identified it as a herbivorous lizard's partial mandible, anybody able to shed some light on it? The other fossil is what I presume to be a footprint cast, I have had two geologists look at it and they can't find anything to disprove the fact that it might be a very small cast of a Theropod footprint! I found it in some yard rocks (like most of my finds) and it doesn't seem to be your typical Grallator. This is either an interesting find or the pareidolia hoax of the century!  If anyone can prove/disprove it, let me know. Thanks! (I'm going to reply with pictures of the jaw since they exceed 3.95)

[Earendil]

Here are the mandible photos.

[Kane]

A very hearty welcome to the Forum.  I won't be of much help here as my specialization is more focused on invertebrates, but I know we have many members who can answer this question. I will move this to our Fossil ID area where more of our members will see it. I do have my doubts about the hadrosaur trackway, but the mandible is certainly a fossil, and one I would guess might even belong to a mammal such as oreodont. But I'll let the vertebrate experts weigh in. 

[ThePhysicist]

A warm welcome to the forum! 

 

For the jaw section, it's mammalian. Post a picture of the top "chewing surface" of the teeth for the most accurate ID. Also provide where it was found, as precisely as possible (for both).

 

For the "footprint," a couple of things: it's often extremely difficult to disprove something. For example, I could say there's a teapot in the asteroid belt. It's very difficult to disprove that, but that doesn't mean you should believe me. Rather, it's about proving something. You need to accumulate evidence that it is the thing you say it is. For example, was it found with other tracks or in a place where we've found tracks before? How old is it, what was the environment, were there theropod dinosaurs existing at that time and place to make the track? Looking at the rock itself, does it have many features in common with known tracks? For the latter question, I'll let experts weigh in. My guess is, simply because the chances of you finding a dinosaur track in your yard are slim, that it is not an actual track. Also, geologists study rocks and the processes that make them (broadly speaking), paleontologists study ancient life, and would be much more qualified to identify your "track." 

[Top Trilo]

52 minutes ago, yardrockpaleo said:

The other fossil is what I presume to be a footprint cast, I have had two geologists look at it and they can't find anything to disprove the fact that it might be a very small cast of a Theropod footprint! I found it in some yard rocks (like most of my finds) and it doesn't seem to be your typical Grallator.

This reminds me so much of my first post, a footprint cast found in yard rocks in the Denver area, mine turned out to be pareidolia but I hope yours is real.

[Earendil]

Thanks everyone, 

 

I have attached the photos from different angles. And I have no clue where the mandible was found. I knew from the beginning the track probably wasn't a track, but who knows, maybe it still is.

 

P.S. Hope you like my profile photo, Koelreuteria allenii, found in Florissant, Colorado

[butchndad]

1 hour ago, yardrockpaleo said:

Hello Everyone,

 

I am a new member on fossil forum! However, I am not new to paleontology. I am 13 and have been obsessed with fossils since before I could walk. I have two fossils I need identified, the first one is a jawbone I bought at a sale from a private collector. I recognize that it is probably not valuable, but I would like it identified. The man who sold it (he was a naturalist) identified it as a herbivorous lizard's partial mandible, anybody able to shed some light on it? The other fossil is what I presume to be a footprint cast, I have had two geologists look at it and they can't find anything to disprove the fact that it might be a very small cast of a Theropod footprint! I found it in some yard rocks (like most of my finds) and it doesn't seem to be your typical Grallator. This is either an interesting find or the pareidolia hoax of the century!  If anyone can prove/disprove it, let me know. Thanks! (I'm going to reply with pictures of the jaw since they exceed 3.95)

 

You write extremely well for a 13 year old.

[abyssunder]

30 minutes ago, butchndad said:

You write extremely well for a 13 year old.

I agree.

[digit]

A real pleasure to see the next generation here on the forum. Lots of great information here that a receptive mind can soak up. I think you'll enjoy being a member here. I'm always impressed when a new member already understands pareidolia and doesn't have to have it explained to them that it is not a mental pathology but instead a fascinating (and sometimes humorous) phenomenon that our brain's advanced pattern matching circuitry produces.

 

Denver should be a good place to allow some interesting fossil hunting opportunities within not too long of a driving distance. Scroll down on the homepage and check out the area-specific fossil information for Colorado and nearby states. Might be some useful information by reading through those postings. You can also see which members are posting there and you might find some geographically near you who can provide some useful tips on fossil clubs, sites, or museums.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Earendil]

Hey folks, thanks for the replies!

 

Florissant Formation in Colorado is about the only public fossil-hunting site near here. I suppose I might as well post some pics of my Florissant finds, one is the Golden Raintree Leaf mentioned above, the other one is two sides of a very beautiful beetle. If anybody's got thoughts on them, please let me know!

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

6 hours ago, yardrockpaleo said:

A very warm welcome to the forum from France!

 

From some other threads I just read on the topic, it seems like @Fossildude19 might be a good person to ask about fossil foot prints. So may be he'll be able to chip in.

 

In any case, most fossil tracks I've seen have typically been left in (very) fine-grained sediments, ideal for capturing the details of a foot print. The sediment your specimen is made off seems a bit on the rough end, but to me still seems possible. Plenty of animals have left fossil tracks and trackways, though - including humans - so finding a fossil print would not necessarily need to be from a dinosaur.

 

A funny story, in that respect, concerns the below print, which I found as a kid on a field in the south of France, on holiday with my parents. Having had experience with foot prints and casts from the quarry at Winterswijk in the Netherlands, I kept this piece, but it took me forever to figure out what it was (and I still don't have a real ichnospecies attached to it). Of course, my first thought was that it could be some form of small dinosaur - possibly a juvenile Rhabdodon, which would've occurred roughly in the area where this was found. It was much later, when seeing pieces of very similar red silt-stone from more less that area offered for sale online - that area being Herault, Lodeve, France - that I figured out the sediment was actually Permian in age, and the prints were therefore left by some kind of amphibian rather than dinosaur!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I've since also found some dinosaur foot prints, and from all this I can tell you it can be difficult to recognize or otherwise positively confirm a track. The best is to familiarize yourself with the various ways in which they can be preserved and the different shapes they take. Below are a couple of confirmed fossil tracks for comparison (taken from here):

 

 

Rhynchosauroid foot cast from the quarry at Winterswijk, Middle Triassic

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jurassic pterosaur foot prints from Cahors in France

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chirotherium cf. barthii foot casts (Upper Buntsandstein, Lower Triassic, Hessberg, Germany) from the Museum Institut für Geowissenschaften in Heidelberg:

 

Some more trackways, this time from the Paläontologische Sammlung, MUT Tübingen and Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt, respectively (both amphibian :

 

And to show you that it's not just amphibians and reptiles leaving prints, here's a piece of Solnhofen limestone from the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Frankfurt:

 

Based on all this, I think you may indeed have a real foot cast - it certainly looks like one. But without a proper stratigraphic context, it'll be really difficult to prove it is, in fact, a cast, let alone identify it. Your best bet would be to see if you can find out the sedimentary unit your find could have come from, then see what kind of fossils these contain to determine if any of those could have left a print.

[Sagebrush Steve]

The jaw looks like it might be an oreodont, possibly a Merycoidodon?  Could you take a photo of it with a ruler in the shot?

[Kiros]

It looks to me an oreodont jaw, herbivore for sure but definitely not a lizard. Anyway welcome to the forum! An hope this forum can help you develop your passion for fossils even more! 

[Earendil]

Thanks, everyone! Merycoidodon was what I was thinking, (maybe Culbertsonii?) with pictures like the one directly below. The second pic of the jaw with a ruler is far below.

And thanks pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon for giving me a glimmer of hope with the footprint! I will definitely contact my geologist friends for dating the rock, identifying the makeup, etc. 

 

[digit]

Just as a quick note for posting images in your topics. If you are going to pull in images from other websites, please save them to your computer first and then upload them to the forum when you are posting in a topic. The problem with external links is that they may work for the moment but link-rot and cyber-decay will inevitably end up breaking many external links. Think of someone viewing your topic several years from now (maybe because they did a search here on the forum for ' Merycoidodon' and came up with this topic). They would scroll down and see possibly a broken link which makes the topics less useful for archiving information.

 

I've fixed the image link above but consider this in future posts. We have nearly 1.2 million posts in this forum and much good information archived here. We all need to do our part to make sure this information lasts as long as our fossils have and does not decay into oblivion.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Top Trilo]

Here's some tracks our own forum members found,

 

 And if you haven't been to Dinosaur ridge in Morrison Colorado, you should take a look, they have several Jurassic footprints 

[Fossildude19]

Looks like it might be a footprint, not sure of the ichnogenus, however. 

Cropped, enlarged, and contrasted:

 

 

[Earendil]

Could you perhaps rattle off some possibilities and I can try to research them? Thanks!

[mstimson29]

Hmm maybe. Pretty weathered !

 

[Earendil]

That's what I thought. It could be the three-toed Amphiuma, but that's a long shot.

[ParkerPaleo]

The mandible is certainly Oreodont, Merycoidodon would be the most likely I wager as well.