Opalized Ammonite - Real or Fake, help!

[ewecollector]

I've recently bought this fossil from a seller on Instagram and these are the seller's pictures, but after some recent digging, I was introduced to the reality of counterfeit and fake ones. Does this one look real or fake? The seller doesn't have location of discovery and I've been trying to google how to learn whether it's real or fake but I haven't gotten far.

Thanks for your time!!

[-Andy-]

Don't worry it's real. I love the mother-of-pearls color on it!

 

The weathering on it is a good hint, and these kinda ammonites are common enough that they aren't faked.

 

Looks like it came from Madagascar.

[dat.blast]

This Ammonite is certainly a real specimen. The Species is Cleoniceras, and it lived during the middle Cretaceous, in what is now Madagascar. That is a nice specimen  

[jpc]

Yup... Real for reasons the others say.  By the way, that is the shell's original mother of pearl, not opal, which is a very different mineral. Both very colorful.

[ewecollector]

Thank you all for the help and knowledge!! I tagged it as opal since the seller said it was a opalized fossil but it's actually cooler that it's the original mother of pearl!

It hasn't arrived at my home yet but it's gonna be the start of a long collection.

[Ludwigia]

A lot of dealers use the term "opalized" for anything that shows that kind of effect. It's mostly not their fault, they just don't know any better since it's a word that's found it's way into everyday language and now means a lot more to the layman than it originally did.

[Aurelius]

Those ammonites are very cool. You don't generally get fake ammonites, at worst there are some which often have the inner whorls carved, where they had originally been lost, but this is almost always extremely obvious.