My trip to the Tucson shows last February

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I put off writing this report until I had some photos taken of the some of the specimens I bought.  A friend took some time from this workday last week and photographed them for me. 

 

I flew out Jan 29 arriving in Phoenix in the afternoon.  A friend picked me up at the airport and we drove to Tucson (approx. 1 1/2 - 2 hour drive).

 

We had just enough time to check out the 22nd Street show before it closed for the day, having been the second day of that show).  One of the dealers had a decent amount of Lee Creek fossils.  I was surprised at the size of the Squalodon incisors.  On my first trip to Tucson back in 1988 I had bought a smaller one.  it's about three inches long but missing a little of the root tip.  At this show the incisors looked to be about 5 inches long.

 

The dealer also had some megalodon and Parotodus teeth from Lee Creek.  They were all in a case so you could not see they from every angle but they were small-to-medium-sized.  He still had them all when I came back to the show two days later.

 

He had some medium-sized great whites from an undetermined California site (maybe that Pismo site because they were light-colored).  They looked nice but they were expensive for their sizes.  He also had some giant Striatolamia teeth from Kazakhstan.  I didn't have a ruler with me but they appeared to be over 2 inches.

 

The next day, I went to another show that was really just a loose collection of tents not too far from the Innsuites but would be a long walk from there.  Most of the tents are Moroccan dealers.  It's a good place to check out.  An American collector was haggling hard for a Notidanodon tooth he liked.  He bought a few other things and did end up getting the Notidanodon for the price he wanted.  I talked to him for a few minutes after he mentioned he occasionally finds Notidanodon partials at Liverpool Point and knew of a complete tooth being found as well.

 

Another dealer had some matrix pieces from a "new" Moroccan site - different sea urchins than I have seen from there before.  He said they were Miocene.  One of the clusters had a partial shark tooth on it - rather large sand tiger.

 

Later, tagging along with friends, I poked around the Days Inn which is not known as a hotbed of fossil selling activity.  I ran across a Texas dealer who had some Lee Creek teeth - mostly tigers and makos but he also had some Texas teeth including some of that South Sulphur River stuff (Maastrictian, Kemp Clay) that was hot about 15 years ago - all the oddball micros.  He told me it was all part of a collection he bought and he had binders full of pages of coin holders with small Cretalamna and Scapanorhynchus teeth.  I looked through what was there but didn't see any of the rare teeth.  I have what I want of that anyway.

 

He had some mosasaur bones but wanted a lot for them and then I looked at a small Riker mount with Ischyrhiza mira rostral spines in it.  There were a few nice ones including a couple almost 2 inches long.  I couldn't recall seeing them for sale around that size.  I thought about it and then bought one of the larger ones.  It's 1 13/16" and had enough water-wear to polish it but not enough to damage it.  The root is dark brown with a black cap and grayish tip and light-colored striations so it's a nice looking specimen.  I really don't know the market on these but they are hardly ever for sale because the people who find them tend to hang onto anything this nice. The dealer said the bigger ones are usually broken and that he had some "heartbreakers" which would have been over 2 1/4" when they were complete.  In any case the one I bought is easily the largest I. mira spine in my collection.  

 

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After buying the sawfish spine, I went over to the Innsuites (or whatever it's called now).  One of the dealers had had a 2-inch-plus Striatolamia set in a pendant in a necklace.  It was weird to see such a large tooth in a necklace.  I helped one of my friends in his booth the rest of the day and the whole next day so I didn't see much other than some of the Innsuites rooms.

 

This year, the Innsuites show including the ballroom opened on Thursday for the first time instead of the usual Saturday.  I was told Thursday and Friday were busy in the ballroom, but when I got there Saturday afternoon, it was pretty quiet.  All the earlybirds would have visited in the first two days.   It was weird to see so few people circulating around the ballroom on the first weekend.  Dealers were standing around talking to each other.

 

The first couple of days were warm (70's) but then the daytime temperature dropped into the low 50's on Sunday.  One of the security people told me it had been a cooler-than-normal winter with day-to-day temperature drops like that in previous weeks. 

 

Monday was my last full day at the shows.  That day, I went over to the Fossil Co-op, an indoor mall that is also open during the year outside of the show.  The first dealer room on the right as you enter is Sahara Sea which specializes in Moroccan fossils.  Last year, my goal was to find at least one Dalpiazia rostral spine and they seem to come only from Morocco.  This year, I wasn't really hunting anything in particular. just keeping an eye open for a good deal on something unusual.  On one of the shelves I found it.  

 

Among a range of Cretaceous and Eocene teeth were little sets of pathologic shark teeth.  Some of them had three random teeth in a row on a plastic-wrapped, rectangular piece of hard foam; others had four teeth.  Some of the teeth were priced individually but others were not.   I was interested in one tooth on one set and one on another but I asked one of the guys (Bill wasn't there) how the sets were priced.  A couple of the teeth were beat-up but as a group the sets looked good.  The price sounded good  so I bought the two sets.   

 

One of the teeth looked a lot like that tooth that FF member "Ynot" (Tony) posted in his thread titled something like "Bent Tooth," which is why I bought it.  The tooth I bought is clearly larger than that one but it has a crown that curves out and up from an irregular root.  Ynot's specimen is from the Sharktooth Hill Bonebed.  I thought could be a Hemipristis parasymphyseal and others thought could belong to Hexanchus with others thinking it was pathologic. 

 

As I walking out of the room, I was thinking about who to show these teeth to.  Isurus90064 was around somewhere so he would have an expert opinion on it.  I turned to walk up the hallway to the next dealer room and who was just twenty feet in front of me?  David Ward.  What are the odds of running into just the person to talk with about oddball shark and particularly those from Morocco?  

 

I showed him my acquisitions and he pointed out that all but one were rather common to common forms of pathology.  He liked one of the teeth because he said it was Cretalamna serrata, an anterior.

 

David pointed out one of the teeth, which he identified as an Otodus, as resulting from being compressed when it was still forming (see photos below).  He said he has seen so many of that form that he could send me 1000 of them.  He added the other tooth, also an Otodus, might have reached its shape the same way.  I said I had a smaller tooth of very similar shape from the STH Bonebed and wondered if that meant it was a Parotodus.  He smiled and had to inform me that the pathology is common to lamniforms and that he had seen it in sand sharks and makos.  It made me think that Ynot's "bent tooth" could be a pathologic mako (either a true mako or Carcharodon hastalis) though it seemed small for that and the root is not as irregular as the Otodus. 

 

I saw Isurus90064 later in the day.  He and his wife were getting ready to go home.  He showed some teeth he picked up at the show.

 

Before I left for the airport Tuesday afternoon, I visited Mark Palatas.  Gene Hartstein was in the too.  It's always great to talk to him, a guy who's been collecting shark teeth longer than me.  He said he remembered me when I was a kid.

 

I visited a dealer that had mostly Permian vertebrate material but he also had some Cretaceous shark teeth - even had some South Sulphur River Ischirhiza rostral spines of about average size.  He told me he sold a couple of good ones early in the show.  I would have liked to have seen those.

 

I didn't find any books at the show but I lost one on the plane ride home.  When the plane touched down, my copy of "The Great Extinctions" slipped out my bag and landed on the floor, sliding forward.  After we parked at the gate, I looked all around for it.  It appears someone grabbed it and left.  Who steals a science book?  

 

Last year, I was in Tucson for four days.  Not counting the travel days, that was only two days in town and that was not enough to give the shows a once-over.  It was busy at work this year too but I was able to be away for three days not counting travel days.  That would appear to be the minimum to see everything fossil-related at least once.

 

Jess

 

 

 

 

 

[ynot]

Some nice finds. Love the giant rostral spine.

Thanks for the information on the bent tooth!

 

Tony

[TyrannosaurusRex]

Very nice. I love Tucson!

[Troodon]

Nice pickups Jess.   Always best when you know what you're looking at when shopping. That rostral spine is awesome 

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On 10/17/2016 at 7:15 AM, Troodon said:

Nice pickups Jess.   Always best when you know what you're looking at when shopping. That rostral spine is awesome 

 

Hi Frank,

 

Yeah, I used to bring home a couple of flats worth of stuff.  Now, I'm happy with a few good deals and a book.  The rostral spine was the find of the show for me.

 

Jess

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On 10/17/2016 at 7:07 AM, TyrannosaurusRex said:

Very nice. I love Tucson!

 

Your Gandalf quote reminded me of a saying an old friend used to tell younger people: the map is not the territory.  I heard it again in the movie, "Ronin."