ID help - Greenville NC/GMR concretion

[AshHendrick]

Found this guy at the wonderful GMR - it was hard to get some decent photos, it's kind of small, maybe an inch each way. I am thinking it's a concretion, initial a snail or something, but I've never found one with the outside of the swirly shell parts concreted so I'm curious if I'm on the right path or not - maybe it's an ear bone or an aliens Egg, I could be way off - so as always, any input is greatly appreciated!! 

 

Found this among small shark teeth (tiger, bull, crow) tilly fish bones and belemnites. 

[Carl]

In my opinion, BETTER than a concretion or snail: it's a cetacean periotic. A dolphin earbone! You KNEW that somehow!

[njfossilhunter]

I agree with Carl ...but it was hard to see at first from the first two pictures but the other two I was able to make out the periotic ear bone. 

[AshHendrick]

I REALLY didn't want to say I thought it might be an ear bone, because I didn't think it would have the swirls inside like that - BUT I thought the bulb on the opposite side looked a lot like something I've seen inside an ear before, haha! That's quite exciting! Already itching to get out of this office cube and into the stream to dig all day tomorrow and Sunday! (30 degrees or not - it's on!)

 

NJ fossil hunter, I was JUST reading a website about the brooks up there thinkin about making a trip up to NJ after first of the year - quite excited to try some new places!

[FossilDAWG]

Is this the actual bone, or a phosphatic cast of the interior, or some combination?  The spiral seems a fantastic example of the cochlea, but I don't recall seeing that so clearly when looking at the actual bone.  On the other hand I am no cetacean expert and I have not seen all that many examples, just a few small ones I collected at Brownies Beach.

 

Don

[abyssunder]

picture from http://rsquirespaleo.blogspot.ro/2015/10/fossil-dolphin-ear-bones.html

 

 

[digit]

Great match, abyssunder! You could get a job at match.com with skills like that.

 

I too was a bit mislead by the first two images. Initially, it started to look like some sort of worn gastropod steinkern. By the time I scrolled down to the penultimate image the confusion was cleared up when it was obviously a cetacean periotic. Then I looked at the last image and from that angle the shape was almost that of a tympanic bulla. I had to scroll back to the top to verify this was all one item and not a group of finds as it seemed to morph so much from one photo to the next. I guess this is a great example for demonstrating that multiple photos of an object (hopefully, focused) from different angles are sometimes needed to clinch an ID based purely on images without having a specimen in hand.

 

Cool find. I seem to come up with more cetacean tympanic bullae than periotics from the Peace River (last weekend I pulled 13 bullae and 0 periotics). I was wondering about this difference as cetaceans have equal numbers of each. I think that the shape and curves of bullae are very distinct (once you have seen a few) and I can now identify extremely fragmented or worn bullae. Periotics have got so much more going on in their convoluted shapes that when worn or broken they probably lose their overall "periotic-ness" and just look like odd bits of phosphate nodules. Assuming both bones are equally dense and are preserved as fossils with roughly the same rate, this is my current working theory to explain the difference in the numbers of each that I find.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[sixgill pete]

Great find. 

[njfossilhunter]

On 12/9/2016 at 4:12 PM, AshHendrick said:

I REALLY didn't want to say I thought it might be an ear bone, because I didn't think it would have the swirls inside like that - BUT I thought the bulb on the opposite side looked a lot like something I've seen inside an ear before, haha! That's quite exciting! Already itching to get out of this office cube and into the stream to dig all day tomorrow and Sunday! (30 degrees or not - it's on!)

 

NJ fossil hunter, I was JUST reading a website about the brooks up there thinkin about making a trip up to NJ after first of the year - quite excited to try some new places!

 

Hi Ashhendrick......If your coming up to NJ to collect let me know. But I will be away from the 4th to the 12th of January ...But if you coming up after the 12th then I can show you around the brooks. PM me if your interested.

Tony

[fifbrindacier]