Bones in septarian nodule from Whitby

[dhiggi]

On a couple of recent trips to the Whitby coast my daughter and I collected quite a few chunks of a large septarian nodule (or perhaps more than one nodule, though everything was collected in a small area) containing bones. Most of the pieces we found just contain ribs, but one piece contains a couple of larger bones.

I’ve had a go at prepping the two best bits, is anyone able to suggest what the bones might have belonged to?

 

Thanks for looking

Edited August 30, 2021 by dhiggi

[Manticocerasman]

a marine reptile for sure, probably Ichtyosaur, but plesiosaur is also a possibility.

 

 

[BobWill]

I'll leave it to others to help with the bones but I am curious how you can tell the concretion is a septarian.

[dhiggi]

41 minutes ago, BobWill said:

I'll leave it to others to help with the bones but I am curious how you can tell the concretion is a septarian.

Because the pieces as well as the rest of the large boulder from which they came are all full of veins of (calcite?) crystal. Wherever these have been in contact with the bone it’s been a sod to prep. 

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

I agree with @Manticocerasman in that these are definitely marine reptile bones, with ichthyosaur, in that case, being the most likely candidate, although plesiosaur and marine crocodile would also be possible. I'm seeing too few diagnostic elements to establish which of these it might be, however, though going by the shape of the ribs and the big flat chunk of bone, I'd say the latter (marine crocodile) is less likely. Still, a very cool find, lots of great bits of bone! Do keep posting as you uncover more, as may be somewhere in the mix there's some diagnostic material! 

[dhiggi]

47 minutes ago, pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon said:

I agree with @Manticocerasman in that these are definitely marine reptile bones, with ichthyosaur, in that case, being the most likely candidate, although plesiosaur and marine crocodile would also be possible. I'm seeing too few diagnostic elements to establish which of these it might be, however, though going by the shape of the ribs and the big flat chunk of bone, I'd say the latter (marine crocodile) is less likely. Still, a very cool find, lots of great bits of bone! Do keep posting as you uncover more, as may be somewhere in the mix there's some diagnostic material! 

Thanks for taking the time to have a look Pachy. Unfortunately we’re not the only ones to have made this discovery; one of the chunks with only a bit of rib has chisel marks, so it’s possible that better pieces may already be in someone else’s collection. Though there is still a huge part of the boulder unbroken, or at least there was a few weeks ago so maybe we’ll find more. We’re still at the stage where any discovery of bone makes the trip a successful one, so my daughter was very happy to add these to her collection (me less so at having to carry so much of it!)

 

PS, how was your holiday hunting? Any good finds?

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

On 9/1/2021 at 8:42 PM, dhiggi said:

Thanks for taking the time to have a look Pachy. Unfortunately we’re not the only ones to have made this discovery; one of the chunks with only a bit of rib has chisel marks, so it’s possible that better pieces may already be in someone else’s collection. Though there is still a huge part of the boulder unbroken, or at least there was a few weeks ago so maybe we’ll find more. We’re still at the stage where any discovery of bone makes the trip a successful one, so my daughter was very happy to add these to her collection (me less so at having to carry so much of it!)

 

I don't know... Chisel-marks may also indicate that someone discovered that piece and just tried to take but a single projecting bit of bone. It wouldn't be the first time that I've seen inexperienced collectors try and extract a single, easily accessible piece from a block with many more fossils on it, just because they don't realise the worth of the rest of the block and don't want to carry a big chunk of rock home with them, as they wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. Although the fact that there were chisel-marks on that one piece of nodule obviously indicates others have discovered the nodule too, I think the fact that the block was left with chisel-marks in it shows that the mark-maker, at least, isn't competition. Still, there may, of course, be others...

 

All the same, an exciting discovery, and I certainly wouldn't let overly much time pass before collecting the other pieces

 

Quote

PS, how was your holiday hunting? Any good finds?

 

Although the shelves I had intended to search were completely sanded over (much like the year before further north) and my wife lost the Estwing pick-hammer I've had since childhood to the sea (while I was still packing up the fossils we had found, she raced against the upcoming tide to get the stroller and our kids off the beach, taking the hammer from my son, who had been using it, and placing it in the stroller basket, which it fell out of; when I went back to look for it, after having discovered it had gone missing, the water had already washed over all the areas she'd walked, and was so close to the cliffs that it almost cut me off on my way back...), we had a great time. That's within the confines of having 4yo and 6mo children with you, of course  High tides were midday and midnight, so with a span of two hours around high tide in which the beach was inaccessible, we often only be out after lunch and only realise it was about 7 or 8 p.m. and time to go home by the slowly setting sun. One of the nicest trips I made alone one evening, the day after we arrived, to scout out the best hunting locations along the beach: I enjoyed a beautiful sunset from atop the cliffs

 

Our daily late departures do not seem to have mattered much in terms of what we were able to find, by the way, as there was little competition (especially further out), most of which did not know either what to look for or how, and you'd rarely see anyone out on the beaches or in town early during the day (the whole village seemed to have been late to rise). And while we didn't have any rain to replenish material, nor did the sea always reach the cliffs to wash new stuff out, I found the Vaches Noires to be quite bountiful this time around. All the same, with the Callovian layers mostly inaccessible it was hard to find good ammonites, let alone marine reptile.

 

Most of what we found therefore consisted of shells, mainly oysters, including Gryphae dilatata, Lopha gregarea, an above average number of Lopha marshii, plenty of Isognomon sp., and a couple of decent Trigonia/Myophorella sp. shells with two valves present. I also found some fragments of larger ammonites in this colluvium, as well as one stick in a Cretaceous boulder I still need from open up (I didn't have time back on the beach, but the specimen looked much better preserved than the rest I'd seen - and with much of the ammonite covered in rock, I think there's a good chance the specimen is  complete).

 

Here's an impression of the material we found. In addition to this there's a rubber bucket full of pieces of shale with shells on, as well as a like shoebox. Those fossils laid out here have been put out to dry after an initial wash, but still need further cleaning and desalination. Many of the smaller and more fragile fossils, including fragments of Cretaceous echinoderm spine and some bits of crinoid, have already been carefully packed away.

 

 

Almost all of this came from colluvium at the base of the cliffs and is therefore presumably Oxfordian in age. On my scouting-trip I discovered a bit of cliff face with a Callovian exposure and exposed shelves in front, however, where we found plenty of Pecten-shells, other types of bivalves, brachiopods and both pyritised as well as full regular ammonites (the latter being extremely hard to extract, though, seeing as how soft both fossil and matrix were - in the end the best specimen of those I've got left is still embedded in matrix and in three pieces, the rest I collected are just fragments). It's here I also found a Trigonia/Myophorella with both halves laid out next to each other and the details of the ornamentation exquisitely preserved. As such, we kept coming back to the same spot every day...

 

 

Our biggest find, however, made at that very same spot, was this tooth, shown below in the field (a couple of layer of Paraloid have already been applied to prevent the tooth from breaking while I cut the block it was on back to size). I think it's a plesiosaur, as I don't see any carinae or compression to indicate its marine crocodilie, and still intend to get it out of the relatively soft shale...

 

[dhiggi]

@pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon

I couldn’t really blame them for trying to break it up, it’s a heck of a walk in any direction. The first time we found it I filled my bag but then put it back down and left behind a few of the pieces with less bone in. 
It may be another week before we get there as we’ve planned Saltwick Bay for tomorrow (the place we found the partial ichthy rostrum a while back) but I might have to take a bigger hammer next time as 1.5kg wasn’t making much of an impression. 
 

Looks like you managed to make the most of the unfavourable tides, some nice pieces there and I love that tooth. Even  better on a piece with other fossils.
I’ve just received delivery of next year’s tide times for Whitby, Lyme Regis and Watchet for 2022, I’ll be sitting down with a list of school holidays tonight to make a plan.

 

We had 5 nights in Lyme last week and then 2 in Bristol, the plan was to spend most of the week on the Dorset coast as we did last year, then have a look to the Somerset coast briefly. Dorset was even busier than last year though and it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to have much success. Charmouth beach in particular sounded like a building site with the constant tap-tap of a dozen or more brand new geological hammers. My daughter had been saving up for something from Chris Moore’s shop so while there we asked him for a few recommendations and subsequently spent most of our week driving up and down to Somerset. Well worth it though as we had a lot more success than last year. Daughter found a couple of ichthy verts, plenty of ammonites and that mystery piece that ended up being identified as shark spine (something new for the collection), so all round a pretty good trip.

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

14 hours ago, dhiggi said:

I couldn’t really blame them for trying to break it up, it’s a heck of a walk in any direction. The first time we found it I filled my bag but then put it back down and left behind a few of the pieces with less bone in. 
It may be another week before we get there as we’ve planned Saltwick Bay for tomorrow (the place we found the partial ichthy rostrum a while back) but I might have to take a bigger hammer next time as 1.5kg wasn’t making much of an impression.

 

Yeah, I can totally image that... I also used to drag big blocks of the beach when I was younger, sometimes even for a single ammonite impression (funnily enough, my son recently wanted to do the same ). But these days I've become much more selective, as not only will it break your back - but once filled up, nothing else will fit into your backpack

 

Anyway, good luck tomorrow! Hope you find more of that beasty!

 

14 hours ago, dhiggi said:

I’ve just received delivery of next year’s tide times for Whitby, Lyme Regis and Watchet for 2022, I’ll be sitting down with a list of school holidays tonight to make a plan.

 

We had 5 nights in Lyme last week and then 2 in Bristol, the plan was to spend most of the week on the Dorset coast as we did last year, then have a look to the Somerset coast briefly. Dorset was even busier than last year though and it was pretty obvious we weren’t going to have much success. Charmouth beach in particular sounded like a building site with the constant tap-tap of a dozen or more brand new geological hammers. My daughter had been saving up for something from Chris Moore’s shop so while there we asked him for a few recommendations and subsequently spent most of our week driving up and down to Somerset. Well worth it though as we had a lot more success than last year. Daughter found a couple of ichthy verts, plenty of ammonites and that mystery piece that ended up being identified as shark spine (something new for the collection), so all round a pretty good trip.

 

I still think you're in such a lucky position to make those trips that easily! Over here, and now especially with the baby, I don't really get to go on such far away fossil hunts - not to mention that the travel alone is very expensive (we recently had a discussion on fossil hunting opportunities in Switzerland and that the vignette you need to enter the country doesn't come cheap, but when I calculated the expense of the toll-roads here in France to reach the Normandy beaches, it's three times as much a round-trip! ). Also, while Lyme may have been overcrowded and you had to evade to Somerset (which presumably burned through a lot of petrol as well), the sites I've been able to visit are typically quite full and have been searched for months without replenishment before I arrive (my wife has a yearly month-long family visit at the start of summer, which would, I presume, be a better time for a fossil hunt - but that's also my prime time to do some fossil prep). As such, I always feel quite lucky when I manage to find at least one marine reptile bone (though I wish there was a chance for more)...

 

Anyway, I've got a bit of an open agreement with somebody I met buying fossils to go on a hunt together this winter when the storms break. He's been quite successful finding marine reptile remains, so I hope he can show me the ropes and my luck will improve afterwards Apparently there's also an Oxfordian site not too far away from us in Switzerland that I plan to visit after a bit of rain. I don't think marine reptile has been reported from there, but at least it beats the distance to the French west-coast while I still have the vignette

 

14 hours ago, dhiggi said:

Looks like you managed to make the most of the unfavourable tides, some nice pieces there and I love that tooth. Even  better on a piece with other fossils.

 

Thanks! Yeah, we did. It turned out quite lovely in the end, even if not without it's challenges. And I do indeed love that tooth (and must admit to not being quite sure yet whether or not to take it out - though this would certainly help in getting a better ID)! As a tooth collector, I couldn't believe our luck when we found it

Edited September 5, 2021 by pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon

[dhiggi]

@pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon

Tell me about it! One time at Sandsend my daughter had totally filled my bag with rocks and then on the way back to the base of the cliff she found a beat-up partial Harpoceras that she wouldn’t part with. Luckily it came up well when I left it with a local prepper.

 

 

I often curse the drive to Whitby, it’s about 60 miles each way, but I have to remind myself how lucky we are to have such a treasure trove that close by. Dorset/Somerset on the other hand are about 250-300 miles so they’re reserved for holidays only.

We’re also lucky that now we’ve both got a bit of an eye for spotting bone (more so my daughter) it now feels a bit of a let down when we go and don’t come back with some. Although it’s nearly always partials in pebbles with no commercial value, it makes her really happy every time and I keep telling her that one day those little finds will lead to a really big, exciting find.

 

Wouldn’t it be possible to expose enough of the tooth for an ID without removing it from the piece? Seems a shame to separate it from the associated fossils

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

10 hours ago, dhiggi said:

Tell me about it! One time at Sandsend my daughter had totally filled my bag with rocks and then on the way back to the base of the cliff she found a beat-up partial Harpoceras that she wouldn’t part with. Luckily it came up well when I left it with a local prepper.

 

The problem I'll soon start facing, now that our son has started actually recognizing fossils, is that I'll want to fill my backpack with my own finds, but he'll want me to carry back his giant blocks as well

 

That Harpoceras turned out a stunner, though! That prepper definitely did an excellent job on it (judging from the photograph, I probably know who it is too)! In fact, hard to believe it's the same specimen, if you consider the restorations and matrix extension...

 

10 hours ago, dhiggi said:

We’re also lucky that now we’ve both got a bit of an eye for spotting bone (more so my daughter) it now feels a bit of a let down when we go and don’t come back with some. Although it’s nearly always partials in pebbles with no commercial value, it makes her really happy every time and I keep telling her that one day those little finds will lead to a really big, exciting find.

 

Well, as far as I'm concerned you guys have been making quite the finds already! And getting your eye in definitely helps, so in that sense "practice makes perfect", as they say. But luck certainly also plays a role. I'd put the Lophiodon jaw I found last August (still need to start prepping it) down to just pure dumb luck. I mean, it's the find of a decade, or may be even lifetime, for the site, and I had spotted some bone in the wall where I was looking for fossils. But I never expected to bump into a giant jaw like that So in that sense, I'm glad my eyes spotted the below piece on one of the colluvium heaps in Normandy, as the colour and pattern are very similar to Liopleurodon-teeth, which are found there and I still hope to find some day (while it has some thin raised ridges to its left side, most ornamentation consists of depressions, showing it's a bit of shell rather than tooth, which is also visible from the cross-section)

 

 

10 hours ago, dhiggi said:

Wouldn’t it be possible to expose enough of the tooth for an ID without removing it from the piece? Seems a shame to separate it from the associated fossils

 

I think you'd need to remove quite a bit off the side in order to see enough to get a confident ID. I mean, you'd need to be sure you've got slightly more than 50% of the tooth, I think, to establish presence or absence of carinae. And while it does look rather nice with the partial Pecten lying next to it, I've got much better specimens of the latter, some free floating ones, some completely matrix-free and with both valves present and intact (if they survive cleaning and consolidation, that is). Also, as the shale is very soft, exposing too much of the tooth may cause it to sit rather loosely in the matrix, risking both it falling out or getting damaged from exposure. I really need to have a look at this piece again soon - but when I've got a fresh head and pair of eyes...

[dhiggi]

@pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon

 

The prep job on the harpo wasn’t actually a matrix expansion, it was reduced to a smaller but more complete looking specimen with some of the remaining outer whorl sliced through to show the mud and calcite infill. I was hoping a few smaller ammos had washed into it but maybe that’s me being greedy!

 

Sunday turned out to be a fairly brief visit (jalfrezi the night before maybe wasn’t a great idea!) but we had a search in all of the usual places we go to there. We found a small chunk of septarian with what I’m fairly sure might be ichthyosaur jaw. Close enough to where we found the larger section of jaw but the preservation looks too different to be the same creature.

Aside from that we got a piece with 2 full and 4 partial peronoceras that I’ve left with a prepper in the hope that he can work some kind of magic and make it presentable. I recently vowed never to take an airpen to a peronoceras again until my daughter had a nice one in her collection. She found a worn hildi that I thought I might be able to rescue but it appears to have no middle. Aside from that it was just a handful of bivalves and some dacs for prep practice.

 

oh nice, have you been able to go back to see if any more than just the jaw is there?

 

 

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

17 minutes ago, dhiggi said:

The prep job on the harpo wasn’t actually a matrix expansion, it was reduced to a smaller but more complete looking specimen with some of the remaining outer whorl sliced through to show the mud and calcite infill. I was hoping a few smaller ammos had washed into it but maybe that’s me being greedy!

 

Smart! I actually didn't think of that, but think I see it now! Could indeed have worked out very nice if a few smaller ammonites would've washed in. But it's still a lovely piece as it is, all the same

 

44 minutes ago, dhiggi said:

Sunday turned out to be a fairly brief visit (jalfrezi the night before maybe wasn’t a great idea!) but we had a search in all of the usual places we go to there. We found a small chunk of septarian with what I’m fairly sure might be ichthyosaur jaw. Close enough to where we found the larger section of jaw but the preservation looks too different to be the same creature.

Aside from that we got a piece with 2 full and 4 partial peronoceras that I’ve left with a prepper in the hope that he can work some kind of magic and make it presentable. I recently vowed never to take an airpen to a peronoceras again until my daughter had a nice one in her collection. She found a worn hildi that I thought I might be able to rescue but it appears to have no middle. Aside from that it was just a handful of bivalves and some dacs for prep practice.

 

Well, you can't win them every time. Still, sounds like you got a good haul for a short amount of time (actually, I recently started thinking that time spent searching might actually be less important than other factors, such as knowing how and where to look, as well as having a bit of luck - unless you're out for quantity over quality)! A piece of ichthyosaur jaw - which I agree it does look like - is a nice find any day, and finding some nice ammonites is certainly also nothing to look down on

I must admit to not having heard of Peronoceras before, so I looked it up online. Some of them seem to be beautifully spinous. I guess your reason for not trying one again has to do with a failed prep and one of those types of Peronoceras? Hope the prepper is able to get you that nice specimen

 

Ammonites have definitely been way less easy to find along the French west coast the past two summers, so again, from where I stand you've been very lucky finding as many as you did

 

59 minutes ago, dhiggi said:

oh nice, have you been able to go back to see if any more than just the jaw is there?

 

Yeah, I have. The site is only about an hours drive from where I live. However, I don't go too often as it's completely overgrown and while I've been finding some nice crocodile teeth there (very small), it takes a lot of work to find a small amount (you'll typically find about five crocodile teeth for a day's work). So when I did get back there, someone had apparently staked a claim to the pit I'd excavated where the jaw came from (at least, that's what the more experienced friend I was with told me). As you need to dig into the cliff-face in order to extract marl to then search (the best strategy seems to just mine the marl and search through it back home), everything was overgrown and I didn't want to pick a fight in a small community of fossil hunters that isn't quite my own, I wasn't able to actually dig around much it to see if there was any more of the fossil there, unfortunately. But, from what I get from the site so far, I think it would've been highly unlikely that I'd have found any more. Finds in the marls where this jaw came from are quite dispersed. So finding associated material is really rare - though I did find what I believe to be a bit of turtle carapace with feeding damage and the tribodont (shell-crushing) crocodile tooth that caused it still in place, one of the few instances where I have found fossils positioned right next to one another.

[dhiggi]

22 hours ago, pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon said:

 

Well, you can't win them every time. Still, sounds like you got a good haul for a short amount of time (actually, I recently started thinking that time spent searching might actually be less important than other factors, such as knowing how and where to look, as well as having a bit of luck - unless you're out for quantity over quality)! A piece of ichthyosaur jaw - which I agree it does look like - is a nice find any day, and finding some nice ammonites is certainly also nothing to look down on

I must admit to not having heard of Peronoceras before, so I looked it up online. Some of them seem to be beautifully spinous. I guess your reason for not trying one again has to do with a failed prep and one of those types of Peronoceras? Hope the prepper is able to get you that nice specimen

 

Ammonites have definitely been way less easy to find along the French west coast the past two summers, so again, from where I stand you've been very lucky finding as many as you did

 

I’d be inclined to agree with you on that; knowing where to look and a great deal of luck are more important than time. Though I suppose it’s the hours that you put in that teach you where to look.

A few months ago that piece of jaw would be a very exciting find, but now the bar has been set higher and it’s sometimes hard to manage the expectations of a ten year old. I just keep reminding her that it’s the frustrating days, coming home with an empty bag, that make the big finds so much more satisfying. 
We’ve found quite a few peronoceras in that location but it’s a place where ammonites often have no centre. Then there’s the failed preps; I started one recently with the pen and the first few spines came out really nicely, but as I moved inwards the matrix became tougher pyrite and harder than the fossil itself. I’m in the process of upgrading my kit though, so once there’s a nice specimen on the shelf I’ll try another.

It seems impossible to go to the Whitby coast and not find ammonites or at least partial ones. After a while you stop getting excited by the dacs though, unless they’re in some way special 

 

The prospect of croc teeth sounds exciting though, our only croc find to date has been a worn pebble with the remains of a couple of scutes

[pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon]

On 9/8/2021 at 10:27 PM, dhiggi said:

I’d be inclined to agree with you on that; knowing where to look and a great deal of luck are more important than time. Though I suppose it’s the hours that you put in that teach you where to look.

 

Very true... If it hadn't been for my understanding of the geology at the site we visited and the indicator fossils therein, we probably wouldn't have been in the right place at the right time to find that tooth.

 

On 9/8/2021 at 10:27 PM, dhiggi said:

A few months ago that piece of jaw would be a very exciting find, but now the bar has been set higher and it’s sometimes hard to manage the expectations of a ten year old. I just keep reminding her that it’s the frustrating days, coming home with an empty bag, that make the big finds so much more satisfying.

 

Though of course very true, I can imagine it indeed being difficult to tell a ten-year-old this. I know I wouldn't have wanted to hear that - not after so many successful hunts. But, yeah, I guess that's where the danger lies: the increasing expectations, and the great number of common specimens already collected and thus left behind on more recent hunts...

 

On 9/8/2021 at 10:27 PM, dhiggi said:

We’ve found quite a few peronoceras in that location but it’s a place where ammonites often have no centre. Then there’s the failed preps; I started one recently with the pen and the first few spines came out really nicely, but as I moved inwards the matrix became tougher pyrite and harder than the fossil itself. I’m in the process of upgrading my kit though, so once there’s a nice specimen on the shelf I’ll try another.

 

Ah, yes! I completely know the feeling! Though not with a mere ammonite, but rather with a rare Middle Triassic ichthyosaur vertebra (no pyrite, but the bone was so much softer than the surrounding matrix). God, did I ever feel bad after the specimen had shattered to pieces in my hand! I had especially waited with the prep to take it to a course in a museum, hoping they could guide me there - but unfortunately they couldn't... And while some of the equipment I had available there is certainly better than what I have at home, I definitely lacked having my own things around for the prep as well. Eventually, I took the pieces to some preparator friends of mine, and they managed to salvage it beyond what I'd have held possible (I'd still like to add more Middle Triassic ichthyosaur to my collection, but specimens like this are so incredibly rare - and hard to correctly ID!)... The way they managed, by the way, and what might help in your case too, is that they would consolidate (with glue) any newly exposed part of the fossil, so that when they'd continue with the next centimetre or so, anything previously exposed would be a bit more solid than it would otherwise have been. That having been said, missing centres is the one big problem when prepping ammonites - and one that's hard to positively predict before starting a prep.

 

On 9/8/2021 at 10:27 PM, dhiggi said:

It seems impossible to go to the Whitby coast and not find ammonites or at least partial ones. After a while you stop getting excited by the dacs though, unless they’re in some way special 

 

Well, to me and my boy ammonites are still very special. He really enjoys it whenever we find any, as they're not all that common on the French coast, and flattened when you find them in the Posidonia Shale (Holzmaden, and the likes). All the same, I know the feeling that the most common fossils are the least interesting if you're collecting a certain site. During my recent trip I did pick up a lot of Gryphea, but am not particularly interested in them as they're very abundant there: nice large specimens with both valves intact. So I quickly got back to being very picky about them. Same for the Lopha gregarea. Lopha marshii is less common, however, so I still picked up quite a number of those. But on the whole, as these are quite common fossils there, at one point you simply pass them by

 

On 9/8/2021 at 10:27 PM, dhiggi said:

The prospect of croc teeth sounds exciting though, our only croc find to date has been a worn pebble with the remains of a couple of scutes

 

I'm not too much into crocodiles myself. I don't know what it is - may be they're just simply not exotic enough, seeing as their descendants/relatives are still with us today. So I'm glad the tooth we found turned out to indeed be a plesiosaur But when it comes to it: marine reptile is marine reptile. So I'll take that any day over any other kind of fossil available at a site

Edited September 9, 2021 by pachy-pleuro-whatnot-odon