No clue. Any ideas?

[beachcomber]

I found something  I haven’t seen before and wasn’t having much luck with an image search. As usual any help greatly appreciated.

Venice Florida beach find.

 

[Fossildude19]

Looks like part of a turtle shell, to me.  Wait for some other opinions, though.

[Al Dente]

5 minutes ago, Fossildude19 said:

Looks like part of a turtle shell, to me

 

I agree. Looks like a couple neural bones from the center of the carapace.

 

 

[digit]

Agreed. A pair of fused neural bones (you can see the remains of the spinal column on the under sides of these bones). The groove pattern on this one does not match my knowledge of Trachemys neurals so this may be either a different genus or pathological bones. Turtle shells quite commonly have growth anomalies which matter little to the survivability of the individual as long as all of the bones fuse together into a complete shell. I'll send these images to my turtle expert to see if he has a comment.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[beachcomber]

Thanks much guys. I hadn’t seen fused bones like this and the groove pattern was foreign to me as well.

[digit]

Usually, the individual bones of a turtle shell disarticulate rather quickly after death due to bone shrinkage that happens as the result of drying out. The Montbrook fossil site here in Florida has an insane wealth of Trachemys bones--virtually all disarticulated individual bones but groups of associated but disarticulated bones as well. Much more rarely we get a turtle shell that was buried in the river bank shortly after death and we get the complete shell articulated (but generally crushed flat).

 

Here is one I found at the site and prepped out over the course of a few months:

 

 

Your two fused bones appear to be possibly neural 3 & neural 4 counting backward from the head end of the turtle. The grooves in the top (outer) surface of the neurals are from the thin scute plates that overlay the bones. Where the edges of these plates join they make grooves across some of the bones (you can see the deeply incised grooves of the squarish scutes that ran down the middle of the Trachemys cf. inflata carapace in the left photo above. Here are some views of a sample neural 3 (with groove running across it) and a sample neural 4 (without this horizontal groove):

 

Neural 3

 

   

 

Neural 4:

   

 

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

[digit]

My source was out in the field yesterday but managed to have a quick peek at the articulated pair of neurals. He said they may be from one of the species of sliders (Trachemys) or could even be from the large box turtle. He'll be back at the main collections building tomorrow and hopefully he'll have the time to compare to some specimens in hand for a more certain ID.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[beachcomber]

Thanks for going the extra mile on this Ken.

 

Steve

[Harry Pristis]

Interesting.  If I had found this, I would call it a severely beach-polished nuchal and neural #1.