claw marks on wood

[M Harvey]

I found these scratch marks on a piece of carbonized wood in central Alabama.  There are six parallel lines.  My thoughts are claw marks made while the wood was terrestrial.  There are no corresponding lines on the flip side so I am ruling out teeth marks.  Any thoughts?  or any suggestions on how to analysis.

[ashcraft]

That is very interesting.  Six lines in my opinion make it unlikely to be a paw scratch as all terrestrial vertebrates have at the most 5 digits.  Possibly insect?  Do you know the age of the material?

 

Brent Ashcraft

[M Harvey]

1 hour ago, ashcraft said:

That is very interesting.  Six lines in my opinion make it unlikely to be a paw scratch as all terrestrial vertebrates have at the most 5 digits.  Possibly insect?  Do you know the age of the material?

 

Brent Ashcraft

upper cretaceous.  Prairie Bluff formation.

[doushantuo]

Just for the sake of completenes: polydactylous tetrapods are known (e,g.Ichthyostega and Acanthostega )

[westcoast]

These marks may be quite recent. Where was the piece found, was it loose or did you extract it from rock?

[ashcraft]

8 hours ago, doushantuo said:

Just for the sake of completenes: polydactylous tetrapods are known (e,g.Ichthyostega and Acanthostega )

You are quite correct.  I assumed that since it was carbonized wood, it was older then these mentioned.  Wood did not exist concurrently with any organisms not based on a 5 toed ancestor ( to the best of my knowledge).  I should have included that in my post.

 

Brent Ashcraft

[Taogan]

I see six clear, but also a possible seventh, and I wonder if the marks are more recent as well. Another theory, what if the wood had been dragged over some sharp gravel or something like that, not all marks have to be made by living beings, we get parallel scratches on boulders caused by glaciers dragging them over rocks.

[doushantuo]

I tend to agree with Taogan here ,and go for a geomorphological cause

[M Harvey]

10 hours ago, westcoast said:

These marks may be quite recent. Where was the piece found, was it loose or did you extract it from rock?

Marks are definitely old.  I excavated it myself and the scratches were on the unexposed side. 

[sseth]

This does not fit the context of the fossil, but this looks very similar to shark tooth serration marks I have seen on a number of other fossils.  This sometimes happens when animals were scavenged by sharks.  Very interesting.

[GeschWhat]

I'm going to step out of the box here. Are you sure that is carbonized wood? The marks look very similar to feeding traces. Any chance it could be bone? 

 

EDIT: Seth you beat me to it!

[doushantuo]

THIS came to mind("C")(Cione et al) 

edit: given no attribution by the authors(no tracemaker identification possible)

[westcoast]

2 hours ago, M Harvey said:

Marks are definitely old.  I excavated it myself and the scratches were on the unexposed side. 

Very cool.  I see the group of six and one other on the side. Just for kicks can we see images of the other sides of the piece?

[GeschWhat]

It reminds me of what I believe to be feeding traces from some sort of scavenging fish found on coprolites from Cretaceous Kansas in this thread. @doushantuo are those traces on wood or bone?

 

[M Harvey]

1 hour ago, GeschWhat said:

It reminds me of what I believe to be feeding traces from some sort of scavenging fish found on coprolites from Cretaceous Kansas in this thread. @doushantuo are those traces on wood or bone?

 

 

 

Here is a photo of the backside if that helps.  The marks are underneath on the right side of the photo.  This is definitely a piece of wood with some worm tubulation.  I think whatever caused the marks is the same animal from your photo of the coprolite.  The spacing is the same and I am counting 6-7 striations.  Also the discussion mentions that a hag fish will bite stones so why not wood?  I should have guessed a fish bite.  My avatar photo is of a pteranodon bone I found with similar markings only on one side.  

[westcoast]

Seems a good call to me. Perhaps the fish was scraping off the epibionts on a waterlogged piece of driftwood.  Nice find.