The Fossil That Got Away

[Nimravis]

Did you find a fossil that you no longer have due to trade, selling or donating and now wish that you had it back?

 

Here is a personal find if mine, that due to changing "likes" in the fossil world, I sold to acquire other fossils that were of interest to me at that time. The rarity of the fossil did not matter much because I had other fossils that were just as special. Now my interests have been renewed in my Mazon Creek finds and I wish I had it back- at least I have a picture of it.

 

The Mazon Creek Onychophoran "Iloydes inopinata"

 

[Darktooth]

Yeah I had a nice pyrited ammonite that I found in Spring Creek, Alden New York. It was about the size of a 50 cent piece. I sold it for $75 dollars when I was hard up for some quick cash. Totally wish I had it back. Now the site is closed to collecting. I always thought I would go back and find another one.

[FossilDudeCO]

White River Turtle. Oligocene.

Testudo thompsoni

Maybe I will find another in Denver this year though!

I do still have a small one, about 9 inches or so that is 98% Original.

But the big boy I sold was about 19 inches long and 95% original.

[Wrangellian]

Wow, I've never heard of an onychophoran from Mazon, I think I would find that one impossible to give up. I hope it found a good home if you can't have it back. Did it have both halves?

I can't say I've ever let go of a fossil that I wished I hadn't, which I guess means I'm clinging onto them a little too tightly?

[-Andy-]

1) Decent quality 6.5 inch Carch tooth (much of it crown) at buyout for 900 pounds. I hesitated and it was gone.

 

2) Good Drotops with spines at 180 USD. I had no idea of their worth until I passed on it. Seller changed his mind and didn't want to sell it anymore.

 

3) Segnosaur egg nest at 1,600 USD. I forgot about the auction, and didn't get to bid.

 

4) A string of 5 associated Camarasaurus vert at 1,500 USD. I hesitated and it too, was gone.

 

5) A 8-inch complete Placenticeras with great colors at 1,070 USD. I was afraid of lowballing the seller as it was expensive. If I knew he was dropping to 1,070 I would've bought it.

 

6) 18-inch Hyphalosaurus at 700 USD. Didn't want to overspend. Regretted big time after auction was over.

 

7) Complete baby Mixosaurus at 3,000 USD. Seller would have lowered for me at his own loss, hence I didn't want to bargain it down, but 3k was too high for me. It's gone now.

 

8) 4.8 incher fat Spinosaurus with wonderful quality at unknown price(but I knew it was cheap). Asked seller about it but it was bought within 10 mins of being uploaded.

 

9) Complete pliosaur paddle at 700 USD. Only saw the listing after it was bought.

 

10) Gigantic 3 inch feather from Green River at 150 USD. I never saw one again as big or as cheap...

[bone2stone]

4 hours ago, Nimravis said:

Did you find a fossil that you no longer have due to trade, selling or donating and now wish that you had it back?

 

Here is a personal find if mine, that due to changing "likes" in the fossil world, I sold to acquire other fossils that were of interest to me at that time. The rarity of the fossil did not matter much because I had other fossils that were just as special. Now my interests have been renewed in my Mazon Creek finds and I wish I had it back- at least I have a picture of it.

 

The Mazon Creek Onychophoran "Iloydes inopinata"

 

At least you have the photo.

My regrets are quite lengthy, but my most regrettable was an Exogyra pearl out of the Eagleford formation (in Dallas Co. Tex.) the size of an avacado seed.

I know the person who sold it to me and it was part of the deal for a picture.

10 years later and continuous pleading and still no picture.

Some things that got away were not sold given or traded, they were outright stolen!

Good thread I am sure there are more stories to come.

Thanks for the memories.

Jess B.

[Ludwigia]

Once a year I head off to Canada for 3 weeks to spend time with friends and family and of course I spend a few days collecting, sometimes at JD quarry in Gamebridge. I've already found some nice stuff there, but as yet no decent crinoids. I didn't really inspect this block properly, since I was thinking about baggage weight, took a photo and moved on. When I got back to my brother's place and started going through the photos, I noticed that I should very well have put it in the bag. I got in touch with the local collectors I knew the next day and they went back to try to find it, but alas, to no avail. Oh well. At least I still have the photo for posterity.

 

 

[Kane]

My entire childhood to adolescence fossil and mineral collection.

 

In terms of minerals, I managed to collect thick books of mica, nickel ore, amethysts galore, hematite, some germanium(!), some very lovely feldspars, chrysotile, fluorite crystals, and a small piece of beryl. All of it given away to a younger person to get her into rocks.

 

The fossils I had to leave behind during the nomadic undergraduate years where moving across the country shipping possessions by bus meant every pound = money I really didn't have. I had a hand-sized hunk of thick, long crinoid stems very much like Roger's picture above. Amid all the trilobites and pyritized nautiloids, my saddest loss was a tapered end of what would have been a gigantic orthocone collected in the west end of Ottawa, the circumference being about 20 inches(!). The length was only about 12 inches, but it was too heavy a rock to transport with so little money. The entire thing intact might have been five or more feet long, judging by the fact that all I had was near the tapered end. My one regret is in not even having taken a picture of the thing, which I would take as some consolation of my once having this beauty in the collection  

[Nimravis]

7 hours ago, Wrangellian said:

Wow, I've never heard of an onychophoran from Mazon, I think I would find that one impossible to give up. I hope it found a good home if you can't have it back. Did it have both halves?

I can't say I've ever let go of a fossil that I wished I hadn't, which I guess means I'm clinging onto them a little too tightly?

Yes- I had both halves and it was open when I found it. The dealer that I sold it to wanted both halves and he still has it in his private collection.

[HamptonsDoc]

6 hours ago, -Andy- said:

1) Decent quality 6.5 inch Carch tooth (much of it crown) at buyout for 900 pounds. I hesitated and it was gone.

 

2) Good Drotops with spines at 180 USD. I had no idea of their worth until I passed on it. Seller changed his mind and didn't want to sell it anymore.

 

3) Segnosaur egg nest at 1,600 USD. I forgot about the auction, and didn't get to bid.

 

4) A string of 5 associated Camarasaurus vert at 1,500 USD. I hesitated and it too, was gone.

 

5) A 8-inch complete Placenticeras with great colors at 1,070 USD. I was afraid of lowballing the seller as it was expensive. If I knew he was dropping to 1,070 I would've bought it.

 

6) 18-inch Hyphalosaurus at 700 USD. Didn't want to overspend. Regretted big time after auction was over.

 

7) Complete baby Mixosaurus at 3,000 USD. Seller would have lowered for me at his own loss, hence I didn't want to bargain it down, but 3k was too high for me. It's gone now.

 

8) 4.8 incher fat Spinosaurus with wonderful quality at unknown price(but I knew it was cheap). Asked seller about it but it was bought within 10 mins of being uploaded.

 

9) Complete pliosaur paddle at 700 USD. Only saw the listing after it was bought.

 

10) Gigantic 3 inch feather from Green River at 150 USD. I never saw one again as big or as cheap...

Ouch. This list hurts!

[RJB]

Been there done that.  Many times even.  Even if I had kept all the things I wished I still had, there would be no room to display them, so Im glad they got new homes, kinda? 

 

RB

[aplomado]

Well, I bought a pretty nice 12" woolly mammoth tooth on ebay for some absurdly low price, $90 I think.... which then "vanished" in the mail on the way to me.  I got my money back but I wanted the tooth... I still haven't gotten a replacement.

[Wrangellian]

On 2017-02-27 at 11:12 PM, -Andy- said:

1) Decent quality 6.5 inch Carch tooth (much of it crown) at buyout for 900 pounds. I hesitated and it was gone.

...

Oh yes, if we're talking about fossils that we saw for sale/auction and missed out on, I could go on and on!

The thing that gets me is, when I see something I want on the Auction site, and keep track of it thru the end, it goes for big bucks. If I get distracted and forget about it, I look later and it went for a song.

[digit]

22 hours ago, aplomado said:

Well, I bought a pretty nice 12" woolly mammoth tooth on ebay for some absurdly low price, $90 I think.... which then "vanished" in the mail on the way to me.  I got my money back but I wanted the tooth... I still haven't gotten a replacement.

 

Me thinks the seller "vanished" this, refunded your money, and resold it later for a less absurdly low price. Or am I a cynic?

 

 

The only fossil that I know of that I let get away was years ago on a shore dive south of Caspersen Beach in Venice, FL. I realized that when the Peace River was too high to hunt during the summer that the coastal waters were warm and inviting (I'm too much of a wimp to go diving in the winter and I don't have to because that's when the Peace is low enough to hunt). I rented a scuba tank from the same shop that offers the meg dives out to the offshore "bone yard" and did a long dive from shore in shallow water (less than 15 feet deep). I was mostly swimming random patterns looking for outcrops of sparse black gravel which signaled fossil prone areas. Mostly I was just surface hunting shark teeth--lots of Sand Tiger Shark (Carcharias taurus) teeth which were a treat as they are less common in the Peace. Trying to excavate the sand where I was finding teeth didn't work out well. Waving my hand back and forth to blow away the fine sand just caused a cloud of silt that didn't settle for way too long and took too much time to clear to see if anything had been exposed. I stuck to swimming and surface picking. I also enjoyed seeing the fishes and other marine life on this dive. It was mostly sandy bottom with a few small patches of reef here and there. I picked up an odd piece of dead coral that puzzled me. I could see the linear striations that looked like the cross-section through a broken coral colony showing the axis of the coral polyp's growth. It was well encrusted by turf and macro algae and some other marine organisms which obscured the surface so I could not identify the species of this unusual item. After puzzling over it for a minute I put it back down in the sand and continued my hunt for shark teeth.

 

After my morning dive I returned to the dive shop post lunch to get a new tank for an afternoon dive. While waiting for the new tank I looked at all of the fossil material that is on display in this dive shop. There is probably as much fossil material as dive equipment in this shop. When my eyes locked onto an object that had been recovered on one of the "bone yard" dives I immediately knew what I let slip through my hands--a complete Colombian Mammoth molar! After the required head slap I grabbed my replacement tank and tried to retrace my first dive attempting a more orderly search pattern. I sucked the rust out of the bottom of that tank trying to relocate that well-camouflaged tooth but to no avail. To my knowledge, it's still out there somewhere--that one still haunts me a little.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[HamptonsDoc]

I really wanted this little unidentified raptor claw in matrix that was for sale in Tucson this year.  The price was right but I decided to sleep on it since funds were running low as it was the end of my trip. Went back the next day to purchase it and I was very excited about it- even dreamed about it that night!  When I got there it was gone. That night I was out at dinner with some friends we were traveling with and heard a story: my friend purchased a few other things from this dealer after I had left and when the dealer took this claw out to show him he dropped it on the floor and it broke into a few pieces! Both gasped and were saddened by the loss of a great little fossil. The dealer glued it back together and gave it to my friend as a gift.  Never told my friend how badly I wanted this little guy. Next time I won't sleep on it. 

 

[gigantoraptor]

51 minutes ago, HamptonsDoc said:

I really wanted this little unidentified raptor claw in matrix that was for sale in Tucson this year.  The price was right but I decided to sleep on it since funds were running low as it was the end of my trip. Went back the next day to purchase it and I was very excited about it- even dreamed about it that night!  When I got there it was gone. That night I was out at dinner with some friends we were traveling with and heard a story: my friend purchased a few other things from this dealer after I had left and when the dealer took this claw out to show him he dropped it on the floor and it broke into a few pieces! Both gasped and were saddened by the loss of a great little fossil. The dealer glued it back together and gave it to my friend as a gift.  Never told my friend how badly I wanted this little guy. Next time I won't sleep on it. 

 

This one made me cry.

[-Andy-]

6 hours ago, HamptonsDoc said:

I really wanted this little unidentified raptor claw in matrix that was for sale in Tucson this year.  The price was right but I decided to sleep on it since funds were running low as it was the end of my trip. Went back the next day to purchase it and I was very excited about it- even dreamed about it that night!  When I got there it was gone. That night I was out at dinner with some friends we were traveling with and heard a story: my friend purchased a few other things from this dealer after I had left and when the dealer took this claw out to show him he dropped it on the floor and it broke into a few pieces! Both gasped and were saddened by the loss of a great little fossil. The dealer glued it back together and gave it to my friend as a gift.  Never told my friend how badly I wanted this little guy. Next time I won't sleep on it. 

 

 

Oh gosh what a loss. I've always wanted my own raptor claw too...

 

*plays Titanic theme*