ID help please - Caspersen, FL

[Florida333]

Hi all, this is my first post!

 

I found these on Caspersen beach, Florida - any clues as to what they may be?

 

My newbie instincts say the brown one may be dugong rib bone and the black one a whale vertebrae?

 

Thanks for any helpful replies!

[Raggedy Man]

The black piece looks like coke or some other by-product produced by smelting or water worn basalt. The other could be bone, but highly worn from water and abrasion. Let's see others have to say.

 

Best regards,

Paul

[digit]

Both look like very worn (and beach tumbled) pieces of bone to me. The color depends on the minerals they've picked up.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Rustdee]

I agree with digit. Both seem like pieces of bone to me. I am not sure it would be possible to be any more specific than some general ideas about what it could be given the locality. For example, whale could be a likely candidate. 

[Florida333]

Thanks for the input! I just joined the site but I must have found about another 50 like the brown one in my collection - some very obviously like dugong rib bones because they are more dense and rounded and fat-finger-like, but many have the bone marrow texture inside and smoother less pitted texture surrounding them.

 

Having found fossilized wood in the UK and some in Florida, I often struggle since bone looks fairly different but has similar hallmarks to wood in that there's an outer bark/bone and an inner xylem/phloem or marrow that often looks similar!

 

Here's what I think is another piece of bone, also from Caspersen and it is very flat and has cracks running up it - just like heartwood might in a cross/section.

[digit]

Petrified wood is actually pretty scarce in South Florida. Just based on the odds alone most of your finds will be weathered bone shards like you've pictured already. Occasionally, you might encounter a small fragment of fossil ivory from a mammoth/mastodon tusk. Those can look even more like pet wood as they are thinly layered. The Schreger lines usually visible on the ends of larger pieces can easily confirm tusk pieces. I've got hundreds of pieces of bone from the Peace River and other sites around Florida but not a single piece of pet wood from Florida in my collection. I would invite any other Florida collectors to post images of their petrified wood specimens here for us to see the difference.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

P.S.: And you are correct that dugong rib bones are distinctive in being solid and lacking the trabecular (spongy porous) interior.

[tmaier]

The black specimen in the first photo is either fossilized tortoise or turtle shell. That is a common find at that beach.

http://www.google.com/search?q=fossil+tortoise+shell+florida&btnG=Search&hl=en&gbv=1&tbm=isch

[Njkberg]

The black piece is turtle shell and the Brown piece could really be any kind of bone fragment. All of the tiny little holes that you see are the bone marrow.