Possible sloth maxilla?

[fossilus]

 

 

I found this in a SE Texas river just over a week ago. It is 16cm, 6.5 inches left to right. It looks to me like a partial maxilla with the cheek process on the left side of the photo.  The "tooth" just above the center of the photo would have been 1.6 inches wide.

Any thoughts?

@JohnJ

@garyc

@Shellseeker

@Harry Pristis

@Lorne Ledger

 

 

[fossilus]

A shot from the "front" looking back.

 

[fossilus]

A shot from the "top' looking down.

[Harry Pristis]

Sloths have peg-like teeth, so their tooth alveolae are simple.  This max has complicated alveolae which eliminates sloth.  I'd start thinking about bison for an ID.

[Lorne Ledger]

Yeah agree not sloth sadly - but it's pretty big by those measurements.  Possibly bison, other candidates could be Camel or Tapir.  I can't quite get a feel for the orientation of the maxillae.  Rather than have you post more pics just yet, can you determine in-hand the tooth row front to back?  Might be able to judge the root layout by which vacancies are which teeth.  So basically which is the M3 or the P2 in the pic, each tooth has a pretty uniform root layout.

[fossilus]

15 hours ago, Harry Pristis said:

Sloths have peg-like teeth, so their tooth alveolae are simple.  This max has complicated alveolae which eliminates sloth.  I'd start thinking about bison for an ID.

Yes thanks Harry! I had found several sloth pieces near where I found this, so my myopia caused me to jump to sloth.

 

1 hour ago, Lorne Ledger said:

Yeah agree not sloth sadly - but it's pretty big by those measurements.  Possibly bison, other candidates could be Camel or Tapir.  I can't quite get a feel for the orientation of the maxillae.  Rather than have you post more pics just yet, can you determine in-hand the tooth row front to back?  Might be able to judge the root layout by which vacancies are which teeth.  So basically which is the M3 or the P2 in the pic, each tooth has a pretty uniform root layout.

Good input! I will need to spend some time sorting the teeth out. One problem though is that at the bottom of the first photo the aveoli are merging into skull voids and it's somewhat hard to tell what is aveoli and what is void.

[Shellseeker]

Late to the party... When you have a hammer, everything is a nail....

I picked up a tapir maxilla a month or  2 back.

It is this kind of photo we seek....

 

and found this photo from Florida MNH

 

 

[fossilus]

Thanks for all the input!  I compared to cow(lower left), bison (lower right), camelops (middle)- (forgive the poor photo, it's hard to focus on multiple 3d objects!  These all seemed to be too small.

Then I thought about a juvenile mastodon crown I had found.  This is the second photo.  For scale the tooth is 2.75 inches.

 

Edited September 30, 2021 by fossilus

[fossilus]

This is a comparison of my maxilla to a digitized mastodon skull on the University of Michigan website. To me not a bad match considering I'm comparing a juvenile to a mature maxilla.

 

 

[JohnJ]

@Uncle Siphuncle might have comparative material.

[Uncle Siphuncle]

I do have a toothless mastodon maxilla that looks quite similar.  No pics handy though.