Please help... is this what I think?

[Adorno.nina]

i found this in the creek that my yard goes into(dallas, TX. Prairie Creek) and been cleaning this for 2+ years with plastic bristle brushes because it looks familiar and the colors and textures keep coming   also some black hairlike protrusions hear and there. This picture needs to be left side down...   i will try for a better photo.

 

the picture.

 

[Fossildude19]

This doesn't show any bone texture, or skull morphology.

It looks like a piece of limestone, to me.  Wait for other opinions, however.

[digit]

This does appear to be a chunk of limestone (or similar rock). It does seem quite polished on the surface and that would be explained by a lot of "cleaning" with a plastic bristle brush. I see from your keyword tags that you might believe this to be the head of a carnivore and by "true form" I'm assuming you believe this to be fossilized looking the way it did in life. Correct me if I'm wrong.

 

Firstly, let me state that fossils do not form with "petrified" soft tissues, skin or organs. Many people new to fossils have that mistaken belief--possibly all those life-like recreations by artists in museums are partially to blame for this belief. Soft tissues decay rapidly after death aided by micro-organisms. Predators, both large carnivores and tiny invertebrates, usually remove most soft tissues from the bones if the animal is not quickly buried by sediments after death. There have been a few well-documented cases of exceptionally rare preservation where hints at what the soft tissues looked like were preserved but in general fossilization only preserves the hard mineralized parts of animals (bones, teeth, shells, etc.) and not soft tissues.

 

Possibly, other views of this rock might help us to see what you believe you are seeing. Our advanced pattern-matching software in our brains allows us to spot familiar shapes in random shapes. It is what allows us to imagine interesting creatures in cloud formations or see faces or recognizable shapes in rock profiles. This is a useful ability that has allowed us to spot camouflaged prey or to recognize friends and foes with only partial visual information. It can often lead us astray to imagine things that are not there--often to humorous effect.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia

 

https://www.google.com/search?q=pareidolia&tbm=isch

 

Welcome to the forum! We enjoy sharing fossil knowledge and identifying fossils brought to us for ID and explaining pseudo-fossils when they occur.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Brandy Cole]

Can you add a picture of the other side?

[Paleorunner]

Apart from seeing the obvious, (a rock) Enlarging the image you can see a curious figure that has caught my attention, "I have marked it with a circle". Surely it's nothing, but just in case someone in the know sees something in it. 

 

Edited April 2, 2022 by Paleorunner

[Mark Kmiecik]

Rotated -- "left side down". 

 

[jpc]

If you think it is a rock, just a rock, then you are right.  : )