Need help with an ID

[Rutanimal]

Need help with this ID looks to be a vertebral centrum and was gifted to me from a friend from the northeast US but that is probably no help.  Thanks for any help you can provide! 

[Peace river rat]

5 minutes ago, Rutanimal said:

Need help with this ID looks to be a vertebral centrum and was gifted to me from a friend from the northeast US but that is probably no help.  Thanks for any help you can provide! 

I find alotta, random bone hunks, if I had a nickel!

[ynot]

I think it is too worn for an id.

Tony

[EMP]

I agree with above, but if I had to make a guess I'd go with some type of whale bone chunk. Dinosaur bones from the Northeast are very rare, and limited to the late Triassic/early Jurassic (which this is certainly not, otherwise it'd be in rock) or from the early/late Cretaceous. I'm not really good with the late Cretaceous, but I do know that in the early Cretaceous Potomac Group (Arundel Clay) it is possible to find isolated dinousaur/reptilian bones that aren't imbedded in the rock like this would be. However, this would be a very significant chunk as most are fragments and chips that can't ever be identified beyond a general family of dinosaurs. Plus, there aren't any early Cretaceous rocks that produce dinosaur bones in NJ from what I know.

 

The late Cretaceous rocks (which is really not entirely accurate, most layers are just silt, gravel, and clay with some iron sandstone thrown in) are entirely marine in nature, and although they have found dinosaur bone fragments in them it has always been as a by-product of finding something else and no significant sized pieces have turned up. Furthermore, the preservation would be wrong if this were to have come from the Severn Formation or similar sequence.

 

I think you have been finding Cenozoic (likely Eocene-Pliocene in age) marine mammal fossils, in which case the most likely option would be whale pieces. The preservation looks spot on from what other specimens from places like Aurora, NC and Calvert Cliffs would be, and it's isolated like finds from those areas are.

[sixgill pete]

I have to agree with a whale "chunk" bone. I find many pieces like this that are beyond ID'ing.