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Wilson Clay Pit mystery


gturner333

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I found this at the Wilson Clay Pit in Brown County, TX. It is Pennsylvanian. I really don't have any idea as to what it could be. Any ideas out there?

 

The hash marks are 1mm.

unknown 1 top.jpg

unknown 1 side 2.jpg

unknown 1 side 1.jpg

unknown 1 bot.jpg

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Could it be some kind of fish tooth plate? Even though it's Carboniferous it reminds me of this cretaceous version I found at Lake Texoma.

 

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Nice tooth!:D

 

It is indeed an early chimaeroid (shark-like cartilaginous fish) tooth. A bradyodontid type chondricthyan to be more specific. The "spots" that you see on the crown of the tooth are called bradyodont structures, but if you want to be more scientific sounding, call them "tubular trabecular dentine." These "spots" are a sure sign of this being a tooth. To learn more about the dentine structures of early fish, you should get the Handbook of Paleoicthyology Volume 3A. It is an awesome resource for anyone who collects these teeth.

 

As for a specific ID, that is very hard. These teeth look different in every part of the mouth so there is a lot of cross-identification between different genera. However, if I was to put an ID on this I would say Lagarodus sp. That is tentative, but given the shape and structure of this tooth, it seems like a reasonable guess.

 

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I always take a 5-gal bucket and bulk sample WCP. That's how i found this. It's like a box of chocolates - never know what you might find. 

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Yeah, I know what you mean. I've had some boxes of chocolate that tasted like old rocks, too. I gotta stop buying those expired date boxes.

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That is a beautiful tooth! I agree with TNCollector on a Lagarodus sp. being the closest match although you might also want to compare it with a Psammodus sp.

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" Lagarodus was a chondrichthyan, distantly related to modern sharks. It had a flattened, pavementlike dentition, like some modern rays. The teeth had different shapes, depending on their position. At one time, teeth now believed to belong to a single species were assigned to three separate species, Psammodus specularis, Psammodus angustus, and Psammodus cubicus. The generic name was later changed to Lagarodus. For a time, all three “species” were united under one name, Lagarodus angustus (Romanowsky). Recently, Lebedev (2008) changed the species name to Lagarodus specularis (Trautschold) for reasons having to do with the nonvalidity of Romanowsky’s species. The three former species are now called the specularis, angustus, and cubicus morphotypes (shapes) of the single species Lagarodus specularis. Lebedev named two more morphotypes, called “accessory” and “orobranchial.” Since only isolated teeth, never an articulated dentition, have been found, the way in which the various morphotypes of teeth fitted together is unknown.
Three very different arrangements have been proposed recently (Elliott, Irmis, Hansen, & Olsen, 2004; Hansen, 1986; Lebedev, 2008). Lagarodus specularis is the only recognized species of the genus Lagarodus. "

 

MINING THE MINES' FOSSIL COLLECTIONS 1: THE EARLIEST-COLLECTED LAGARODUS FROM NORTH AMERICA - Wayne Itano. 2012 pdf

 

 

" We are not separate and independent entities, but like links in a chain, and we could not by any means be what we are without those who went before us and showed us the way. "

Thomas Mann

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