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please help identify - colorful bone with chop marks


wart

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hello and i thank you for your opinions and i welcome your admiration of this beautiful find.  can you identify it?  do you see the "chop" marks in the green crust?  they appear all the way around the bone.  the first picture, it is wet on a sunny day - the others are dry on a cloudy day.  it weighs 8 pounds.  it is 8 inches wide and about 6 inches tall and 6 inches deep.  i found it digging in denton - i landscape - most likely fence posts or plants - i dont remember - what i do remember is i had it for years before i recognized that it was a bone...when i grabbed it i thought i grabbed a green rock, which was fine with me.  years later i found it again in a pile of stuff, so i washed it off and low and behold....its a bone.  some time later i picked it up again and noticed it had chop marks or looks like chop marks and i also noticed that the chop marks are all the way around.  am i wrong ?  oh yeah, i dont know what animal this bone comes from - any ideas ?

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Looks like a mosasaur vertebra. But alas, I don't see "chop marks".  Any such marks could be feeding damage.

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'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'

George Santayana

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When bones slowly erode away they often have traces on them in the form of what you are interpreting as "chop marks". They are however just the result of weathering.

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Greetings from the Lake of Constance. Roger

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Agreed. The chop marks have an angular pattern of fracture which indicates that they were not made when the bone was fresh.

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9 hours ago, hemipristis said:

Looks like a mosasaur vertebra. But alas, I don't see "chop marks".  Any such marks could be feeding damage.

thank you for your reply.  thank you all very much.  mosasaur....that makes sense to me....we are covered up with sea creature fossils around here....seems as if weve been underwater before....and maybe again some day.  so that animal seems likely.  a sea creature...is that why its so colorful?  i will add more pictures. 

 

4 hours ago, Rockwood said:

Agreed. The chop marks have an angular pattern of fracture which indicates that they were not made when the bone was fresh.

 

5 hours ago, Ludwigia said:

When bones slowly erode away they often have traces on them in the form of what you are interpreting as "chop marks". They are however just the result of weathering.

 

9 hours ago, Scylla said:

What do you mean by "chop marks"?

 so the "chop" marks could be "chomp" marks or erosion.....makes sense to me....however, with the addition of more photos i think what you might be able to see are (this is scientific) chomp marks that are extremely close in shape and in depth and happen all the way around the bone and each chomp breaks through the green crust and scoops out the bone below....very much like bites out of an apple....and, again, very much the same pattern around the bone despite the changes in bone shape or lets say orientation while underground or underwater.  i will draw on a photo to make the erosion marks and the pattern more visible.  until then i will describe the area better im looking at - there is a green crust on the bone - at the bottom of the green crust (in the original colorful photo in the OP) the crust is chopped, chomped or eroded in a rainbow shape or double rainbow (what does it mean?) and and is followed into the red area with a slight shallow and smooth scoop below it.  this happens all the way around the bone....but gets lost on the back of the bone where - oh yeah!...the tendon area where you can see how some sort of muscle or tendon passes through - or by - the bone. william

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First of all, it would be helpful to provide a metric scale in the fotos and the place and strata where the bone (yes, it is a bone) was found.

Second to mark the "bitemarks" in the photos.

On the pictures provided, i cannot see any sign of "bitemarks" or whatsoever.

I think it is heavily eroded, so the "bitemarks" are caused by erosion.

Could be Mosa, but not sure - let's see what others will tell...

 

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As others have mentioned, what you are seeing are eroded parts of the bone that reveal the internal bone structure...not "chomp" marks.  Do you have a photo of the side resting on the ground?  

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The human mind has the ability to believe anything is true.  -  JJ

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It does seem possible that there was some sort of bio-erosion on the bone before it's burial. At this point it's going to be difficult to determine what if anything may have caused it though.

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1 hour ago, Rockwood said:

It does seem possible that there was some sort of bio-erosion on the bone before it's burial. At this point it's going to be difficult to determine what if anything may have caused it though.

absolutely understood, thank you

1 hour ago, JohnJ said:

As others have mentioned, what you are seeing are eroded parts of the bone that reveal the internal bone structure...not "chomp" marks.  Do you have a photo of the side resting on the ground?  

excellent input, thank you very much

1 hour ago, JohnJ said:

As others have mentioned, what you are seeing are eroded parts of the bone that reveal the internal bone structure...not "chomp" marks.  Do you have a photo of the side resting on the ground?  

i will provide more pictures with scale, i thank you for your informed response.

2 hours ago, Pemphix said:

First of all, it would be helpful to provide a metric scale in the fotos and the place and strata where the bone (yes, it is a bone) was found.

Second to mark the "bitemarks" in the photos.

On the pictures provided, i cannot see any sign of "bitemarks" or whatsoever.

I think it is heavily eroded, so the "bitemarks" are caused by erosion.

Could be Mosa, but not sure - let's see what others will tell...

 

you are right - i should have photo with a metric scale - i will do so.  i take all suggestions seriously and will provide further details.  thank you very much for your input

dino bites 2.jpg

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i thank everyone for their informative responses.  here are the pictures i already have - i will take the photos requested soon.

william

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I doubt that anything with teeth slender enough to leave holes spaced so closely would be chewing on a bone this size.

Bivalves boring into it at some point seems possible though.

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6 minutes ago, Rockwood said:

I doubt that anything with teeth slender enough to leave holes spaced so closely would be chewing on a bone this size.

Bivalves boring into it at some point seems possible though.

i agree and thats interesting - i need to quit thinking this thing died on land...it sank and some bottom feeders ate the flesh and those worm eel-like things (hagfish) came and ate into the knuckle areas and gnawed the thing to the core - thats a great mental image.  much different than the tool i thought that could have made those marks....chopping the limb from the rest of the carcass or removing the flesh from this particular part of the animal.  so perhaps its erosion or perhaps its a bottom feeder sucking the thing down to the marrow - thats great!

 

am i wrong to say this is a "colorful" fossil?  is it like this due to fossilization underwater?  am i wrong to handle it?  am i wrong to think this is a great specimen?  it does make a great paperweight !

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1 minute ago, wart said:

am i wrong to say this is a "colorful" fossil?

Perhaps someone who isn't color blind should take this one. :)

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I'm fairly certain this is not an eroded mosasaur vertebra.  I would research other vertebrates in the Woodbine Formation.

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The human mind has the ability to believe anything is true.  -  JJ

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3 minutes ago, JohnJ said:

I'm fairly certain this is not an eroded mosasaur vertebra.  I would research other vertebrates in the Woodbine Formation.

i will do just that - thank you very much !

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11 minutes ago, JohnJ said:

I'm fairly certain this is not an eroded mosasaur vertebra.  I would research other vertebrates in the Woodbine Formation.

i search woodbine and then i search the fossils found in that area - unnamed theropods was one of them - when i search that i look at all the different classifications of animals and i see this - Coelophysis bauri - with this description.... "numerous complete to disarticulated skeletons in reddish-colored fluvial siltstones"

 

using this animal as an example of the colors in my rock....i cant help but put my fossil as part of the rear knees.  any chance of that? unfortunately this animal comes from the new mexico area but i now have a colorful concept of how some of these fossils can look....other than brown.

 

another animal - the protohadros - similar in body structure....and, again....im drawn to the rear legs.  here is a tibia from the protohadros found about an hour from denton, in arlington - arlington archosaur site (AAS) in 2003.

1920px-Coelophysis_bauri_mount.jpg

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The color of your bone find is not a distinguishing characteristic. 

 

Maybe @LanceH or @BobWill can offer some insight. 

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The human mind has the ability to believe anything is true.  -  JJ

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47 minutes ago, JohnJ said:

The color of your bone find is not a distinguishing characteristic. 

 

Maybe @LanceH or @BobWill can offer some insight. 

oh, ok.  i was thinking colors would narrow down the subject matter.  thank you for clearing this up.

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10 hours ago, JohnJ said:

I'm fairly certain this is not an eroded mosasaur vertebra.  I would research other vertebrates in the Woodbine Formation.

Alas, after seeing the other photographs, I tend to agree with you: Not a mosasaur vert.

My bad.

 

End of a longbone?

 

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'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'

George Santayana

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3 hours ago, wart said:

oh, ok.  i was thinking colors would narrow down the subject matter.  thank you for clearing this up.

Color is usually the result of the geochemistry of preservation. It's usually more instructive about in what formation the bone was found (sometimes it can be quite characteristic, such as with megalodon teeth), than an aid in species identification. There are of course exceptions. 

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'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.'

George Santayana

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