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Fossilized 1/2 bone, 4.5 inches, Seems to be a humerus. Searching the internet, I came across this photo of a much larger complete humerus. What do you think?

Hi, I am an alligator from Florida's Peace River. I live in a drainage pipe near an unnamed overpass on Highway 17. I hear that fossil-hunters often have questions regarding me and my fellow reptiles. I will now answer any and all questions.

After a two month Covid lockdown hiatus, I finally managed to hit the river again yesterday. Loaded up the truck and headed out to Gardner. I wanted to spend some more quality time at the same spot where I found a ground sloth phalanx on a previous trip - I was hoping to find more of that sloth. This spot is a little further away than my usual Gardner spots, so it sees less pressure and I suspected some megs might be hiding there because I kept finding broken frags and lots of other shark species. A couple of notes - 1) The long dirt road leading to the boat ramp has been resurfaced by the county. It's a much more pleasant ride and a lot less bumpy now. As recently as my last trip in March, that road was pretty darn rough and you would vibrate your vehicle to death if you drove over 5 or 10mph. The county laid down some new gravel and re-graded it. It's much better now and won't tear up your suspension. 2) When we arrived yesterday morning, the USGS Zolfo gauge said the height was 4 feet and the flow was 52cfs. That gauge is also a pretty good indicator for what to expect at Gardner. It was very low. The lowest I have personally seen it there. Long stretches were too shallow to paddle, so be prepared to do a lot of walking and pulling the kayak/canoe behind you. Also, the low flow rate was making the water very soupy and cloudy. Visibility was poor, even in the shallow spots. It wasn't a full-blown algae bloom yet, but getting there. When the gauge height starts getting below 4.25, then it's almost too low to hunt. Personally, my sweet spot is between 4.5 and 5.0. If you are going to hunt Gardner, keep the gauge in mind and adjust your hunting accordingly. Diving or snorkeling in that soup would have been unproductive. So, after some paddling and a lot of walking, we (my wife and I), arrived at the hunting spot. I spent about 5 hours there and probably turned over about 75-100 sifters worth of gravel. Some other hunters had already hit the spot, because I saw shovel marks and spoil piles. That explains why I wasn't finding as much as I had hoped. Even being more remote and seeing less pressure, this spot still gets hunted. I really need to invest in a motor to get back and forth to the really distant places. I found a nice handful of smaller teeth, a nice large thresher with good color, and one decent megalodon. My first meg since 2018. I was pretty happy about that, since I seemed to be cursed lately with megs. I couldn't buy a meg to save my life over the last two seasons. I found a few half-megs, but this was my first intact decent one in quite a while. It has a little bit of root damage, but is 95% complete and about 2 inches. Not spectacular, but it broke the snide. We only saw one small gator and one turtle. Lots of birds were everywhere and there were a lot of butterflies fluttering around the wildflowers - a lot of yellow wildflowers (coreopsis), so that was pretty to see along the banks. We also saw a great blue heron catch and swallow a small snake. That was pretty neat to see. My wife is still downloading the photos, so I will post those later. My back still hurts, but we had a great time and enjoyed getting out. Surprisingly, for a friday on a holiday weekend, the ramp and river were pretty quiet. We only saw a small handful of other people the entire day. I suspect this weekend will be busier. PS - a couple of hours after we left, a storm hit the Peace basin and the river jumped a foot.

I recently found a broken canine (split in two) that made me think. The site usually produces a fair amount of Pliocene fossils. Here it is. The length of the tooth is 2.5 inches of which 1.5 inches is enamel. I know a lot about Florida whale teeth and I have frequently said that horizontal banding rings are a "tell" for whale. This one has such horizontal rings. However it has differences from the "normal" whale teeth I find: 1) The enamel is on the outside of the tooth and longer than a tooth this size should have; 2) Most Florida whale teeth have slightly rounded rather than sharp tips. Here are some more common Florida whale shapes: Maybe it is Orycterocetus or or even a large alligator tooth. Comments appreciated. At the same location, I also found a bird bone and wondered if it had a Pliocene age. Maybe @Auspex can assist, identifying the bone and candidates Jack.

I found this interesting looking bone in the peace river yesterday sitting exposed in a gravel bar, I think it’s a rib but I’m not positive. Also is it possible to identify what animal it would’ve come from? Or at least a relative size of animal?

I was prospecting / hunting yesterday and initially struggled to find a diggable location. After paddling upstream a couple of miles, I noted some debris (and hopefully gravel) on a sandbank coming out from the bank. I stopped to chech it out and almost immediately saw a fragment of horse tooth, pick up a tuttle footpad and then barely covered in water, a high quality 3 inch diameter whale vert. YES!!!! This stuff had to have come downstream, now if I could figure out where. I did find a likely spot with gravel, somewhat smaller than I would prefer. In the 1st sieve, I found a tiny tooth that might be a Meg or might be a Bull..., In the 2nd sieve, I found a tiny tooth that might be a Meg or might be a Bull... In the 3rd sieve, I found a tiny tooth that might be a Meg or might be a Bull... I did not see another tooth or fragment that remotely resemble a Meg: So, which ones are Megs and why.... #1, #2 #3 As an aside, great social distancing, left my vehicle at 6:30 am, returned at 3:45 pm. Never saw a single person.

Decided to get out today and practice some social distancing on the river, did pretty good but ended up with these two unknowns some kind of antler maybe? Or bone? a rather beat up tooth of some kind Id appreciate any help on these

Greetings! I hope everyone is staying well out there. I found this tooth while sifting in the peace river a few days ago. I usually only find shark teeth and horse teeth - rarely whale or dolphin but this is my first Tooth of this type !! Is this a premolar from a canine or feline...or neither? something carnivorous though right!? The shape is similar to photos of a bear dog tooth I saw on the forum but it’s pretty small. It’s about .5” X .5” Thanks for looking. Cheers, Marie

Local Florida fossil-hunters are familiar with this chunky matrix rock. It is commonly called "Gardner Matrix" or "Micro-Matrix". The material in this post was recovered from an exposure close to the boat ramp at the Gardner locality on the Peace River. (Bone Valley formation, Hawthorn group, Hardee county, Miocene). With most of us locked down due to the pandemic, I have plenty of time to sort through this loosely-consolidated and fossiliferous matrix. It's like fossil-hunting from your back porch. On my last few trips to Gardner, I loaded down my kayak with chunks of this matrix. On one trip, the nose of the kayak was dipping into the water and I was almost too overloaded to paddle back. LOL. This matrix represents an ancient Miocene sea floor. It is made up of tiny pebbles, shells, shell fragments, sand, bone bits (usually cetacean), and shark teeth. Most of the fossils have nice coloration with blue tones being common. I have gotten lucky and found a 2-inch megalodon in this same material, but that is quite rare and has only happened twice to me (one time the tooth was poorly preserved and crumbled apart on me). There are generally two types of this matrix. One is very friable and breaks apart easily with just a light tap of the hammer. You can even crumble it with your hands. The other type is harder and more solid with a orange-tan, iron-rich cementing mechanism going on. This latter type benefits from being wetted with a garden hose while breaking it apart. You can sift this material through a 1/4" and then 1/8" mesh screen to get the little stuff from it. Detail-oriented (and patient) folks can further sift it through a window screen to get the TINY fossils out. Personally, I don't have that level of patience and tiny tiny tiny micro-fossils are not really my thing. So, I sort it through a 1/4" screen and then discard the remnants into the garden. This material is phosphate-rich, so it's good for your plants. I busted up a chunk yesterday and took some photos. This particular chunk had a bunch of tiny shark teeth embedded in it. You can see one of the teeth poking out of the surface. This particular chunk was not very generous. It gave up about a dozen small teeth and a medium-sized chunk of bone or tusk - the latter of which I still need to snap a photo of, but I don't think it's identifiable. I know some of this matrix material has been sold or traded around this forum over the years, so I am curious if anyone else has been searching through it lately to satisfy their fossil-hunting urges during quarantine/lockdown. Miocene sea floor. You can see the chunk of bone hidden inside this piece. Nice little tooth with blue coloration peeking out of this chunk. A little careful work and he's free. Lots of little teeth in this chunk, but no big ones yet.... I'll break up some more material today and update this thread with my finds. Wish me luck! I want that meg!

Stuck home, sorting hundreds of ziplock bags from last year. WOW, how did I forget these. A toebone that I think is predator and if so, a robust predator --- This is a toebone, think of the size of yours. and in the same Ziplock, a jaw segment. As far as I can tell the width of the Jaw around the alveoli is unbroken. Who recognizes this m2-m3?

Here is an odd one. It's very hard and mineralized. I found it in an intermingled deposit of Pleistocene and Miocene material - I was pulling shark teeth and mammoth ivory fragments from the same hole. So, I don't know if this bone is some Miocene marine critter or a Pleistocene land beast. Can anyone tell what this is? Found in the Peace River, near Zolfo Springs (Bone Valley formation). Thanks in advance!

Here's a weird one. I found this big bone that looks like a knuckle or knee cap. I am completely stumped on this one. Does anyone know what the heck this is? Thanks!

This nifty little gem turned up in my sifter yesterday (Peace River, Bone Valley formation, Hawthorn group, Hardee county, Gardner Florida). I have no idea what it is. All of these little mammal teeth look the same to me. I tried to take the best photos of it that I could, but it's small and tough to get the crown in focus, but I think I managed it...maybe. Does anyone know what animal this comes from? Thanks in advance!

Due to the proliferation of Covid-19 “stay at home orders”, I felt an urgency to go out and fossil-hunt at least one more time before my city, county, or the entire state got put on lockdown. I loaded up the truck on saturday night and we headed out to Gardner early on sunday morning. When we arrived at the ramp about 9:00am, there were a lot of vehicles and activity – much more than my previous three trips. I think a lot of people had the same idea – get out and enjoy the river while you can. It was a beautiful day with plentiful sun and a cool breeze. We loaded up the kayaks (my wife, my stepdaughter, and my grandson) and we headed upstream to check out our usual spots. As we were going up around the bend and our first site came into view, we saw a pair of fossil-hunters parked right in “our” spot. Looking further upriver towards our second spot, there were fossil-hunters in that spot as well. The early bird gets the worm and these folks beat us to a preferred spots. So plan B came into action and we paddled further upstream. We paddled further than we have ever been previously. Looking for gravel beds or exposed strata eroding into the river, we found a good spot about another three-quarters of a mile beyond our usual spots. On this day I decided to be picky and only go after teeth or highlight specimens. I have buckets full of dugong ribs, chunkasaurus, and turtle scutes at home, so I immediately discarded those when they turned up in my sifter. I tossed them downstream behind me into the river and kept digging. My 10-yo grandson held the sifter and helped me with sifting and he got a big kick out of pulling teeth and bits from every shovel load. A little further down the bank, my wife was snapping nature photos and my stepdaughter was digging and sifting in her own spot about 50 feet away. This spot was a tease. Tons of small teeth and common stuff, but only tantalizing fragments of the better stuff. A broken quarter of a mastodon tooth, broken megalodons (fragolodons), etc. I think I did find a couple of baby megs (when they are tiny, I find them hard to discern at times, versus bull or mako). I felt that there must be at least one good meg in this spot, so I dug like a man possessed. I moved a lot of gravel and dug three bomb-craters in the river bed, but to no avail. That big meg eluded me. Eventually my back started complaining and we decided to call it a day. We saw many other hunters on the river, some operating alone and others in groups. We would exchange pleasantries as we passed them by - “How yall doin’?”…… “Beautiful day!”…..”Having any luck?” - most were friendly and reported results similar to our’s – lots of small stuff and oddballs, but nothing to write home about. Of course, if I found a pocket of 100 megs in a hole, I would say something along the lines of “Nah, just little stuff and broken stuff.”. I hope they had better luck than I did. I often wondered if any of the other hunters were forum members, but I never asked because I don’t like intruding on folks or being nosy. But if any of you reading this saw two green kayaks (one of them a bright neon green tandem) pass by with a tall lanky guy, two women, and a kid, then say hello here so I know it was you! I spoke to a couple of fossil-hunters who had rented canoes from Canoe Escape and put in at Zolfo Springs. They told me that Pioneer Park (and the ramp) had been closed earlier that day and that the public park at Brownville was also closed. Both of those are parks with facilities and staff, so I expected they would close eventually. Gardner is just an unstaffed ramp with no facilities, so hopefully it stays open. Hearing that made me glad we decided to go when we did. As I sit here writing this, Hillsborough County (where I live) is about to announce a “stay at home order” - threatening the rest of our fossil season. I know that exercise is considered OK for going out (essential), but I don’t know if driving three counties away to fossil-hunt will be viewed as “exercise”, so I am unsure if I will see the river again any time soon. I guess now we wait and see how this whole Covid-19 thing plays out. I hope this is not the end of fossil-season for us because the water is so LOW. I brought home a much lighter load this time around, having decided to leave all the dugong ribs and chunks of matrix behind. My highlight of the day was a small fossil tooth that I pulled from my first hole. It’s intact with both roots and an undamaged crown. I will try to get it ID’ed today. I also found a couple of very small teeth that I think might be baby megs, but I am unsure. I’ll post photos of our swag when I get everything spread out and dried. I was so tired when we got back last night that I didn’t even inspect or lay out my finds. I showered, ate, and went to sleep by 9:30pm. My wife is still downloading her photos now, so I added visuals to this thread later today. EDIT : apparently the guy I spoke to on the river was wrong - Pioneer Park is still open.

Last one from the Peace River! There’s three ridges where my finger is pointing.

Another stumper! This one has a sheen to it that doesn’t show up well in the photos. I try to show all sides. It’s cubed in shape.

First time poster! Going through my collection and I have some that stump me. Any idea on this one?

from Peace river, Florida. Thoughts!

Inspired by @Harry Pristis's recent post in the member sales forum, I found this oddball in my sifter on monday's hunt. It's dense and mineralized. It "clanks" when you tap it. However, it has a very organic shape and a wood-grain texture. I have found the silicified white variety previously, but could this be an example of phosphatized or something other local variety of fossilized wood? I've found a lot of river-tumbled bone chunks and ivory chunks, but this one seems different. Not quite bone, not quite antler, not quite ivory, and I am fairly certain it's not just a rock.

Here are two small oddball bones that I found. Both appear to be complete or mostly complete, but they have odd shapes that I am having difficulty making sense of. This is especially true for the last one, which is shaped like a human ear (I know it's not that, LOL, but that's what it reminds me of). Both were found in my sifter on the Peace River at Gardner (Pleistocene?, Bone Valley, Florida) Any help would be appreciated. #1 #2 -

On my last trip to Gardner (Peace River, Bone Valley member, Hawthorn group, Hardee County, Florida), I found these small Pleistocene mammal/vertebrate teeth. Even when these are pristine, I have difficulty with them because they all look so similar. Some of these are pretty worn, so ID might be impossible. I tried to snap good photos of the crowns to show the distinctive "squiggles". Can anyone ID these? Any help would be greatly appreciated. I compared them against photos of previous teeth I have found, but I couldn't come up with anything. Three more, with one oddball on the end :

When I first found this tooth, I paused. Many times I have stated that horizontal banding in the Peace River means one thing--- marine mammal, likely whale. This tooth is very small, could be something like Aulophyseter, but I am no longer so sure. Decided to see if others recognize this tooth.

My name is Wilson and I live in the Tampa area. Moved here two years ago from the Pacific Northwest. Last year my 6 year old who loves dinosaurs innocently asked if we could dig for fossils in our yard. Well, in lieu of trashing my lawn, I quickly Googled fossil hunting in Florida and immediately wanted to take him to the Peace River. This was mid May so we ordered permits, built sifter boxes, zip tied pool noodles to some shovels, loaded our inflatable kayaks and headed to the launch at Zolfo Springs. Went up river exploring for the day and found a few baggies full of smaller shark teeth and turtle shell chunks. A week later the whole family went downstream and found a lot of the same with a few other unique things. Then the season ended. We spent the last 8 months addicted to the thrill of finding cool fossils. Watched numerous YouTube videos, ordered a few books, and laid out the novice collection on the dining table a few times to show friends and family. This year we are giddy with excitement. Last week went to the river for a first this year and third time ever, a little wiser, and had a good day. Still frustrated at finding a good reference guide to what exactly we are finding. Many fossils are complete unknowns. We are now past the stage of grabbing every chunk of dugong rib we see. Still tempting and cool though. We would like to join in the community and learn about this wonderland of fossils that abound in the region. Looking forward to the interaction and sharing finds.

The last time I got out on the river was back in mid-January. Since then, I have watched the USGS gauges while the weather stayed mostly dry. The river height and flow was dropping steadily and just when I was ready to go hunting again, the entire house got sick with the flu - this was right before the coronavirus started grabbing all the headlines. It was very frustrating to sit inside the house while the weather was so beautiful and the river getting so low. Yesterday was the first day where the wife and I both felt close enough to 100% to brave the trip and go hunt some fossils. I loaded up the truck the night before and we headed out the door just before 7am. The drive was uneventful and we arrived at the Gardner ramp on the Peace River about 9am. We hadn't been back to Gardner since 2017, so it was a pleasant change of scenery from my usual spots. The plan was to revisit a couple of old spots we had found on previous trips back in 2016. I hadn't laid eyes on this stretch of river in a long time, so I was not sure what changes to expect. To my surprise, the ramp area was dead. Nobody else was there. Usually the ramp is quite busy, but our timing must have been very good. We had the entire area to ourselves. (Going on a tuesday morning helps) The last time I was at Gardner, the water level was almost two feet higher, so I was pleased to see how low the water was. The current was also quite lazy. The USGS Zolfo Springs gauge read 4.6 feet and the flow was about 120. You can tell in the photo below how low the water is by looking at the opposite bank. Now, I am not going out of my way to obfuscate the exact location of my search spots in this report. This is because this stretch of river is heavily hunted and these spots are known to other hunters. This fact was reinforced on me when we arrived at the first spot and found shovel holes and spoil piles nearby. But more on that later... I have been to Gardner a handful of times previously, but the water was never this low. In fact, I ended up jumping out of the kayak and dragging it behind me while I waded through knee-deep water. My wife rode like a queen in the front seat of the tandem kayak and snapped photos. Our first destination was about a mile upstream, so there was a combination of wading/pulling the kayak and paddling. The water was running surprisingly hard in a couple of places, but the paddling was never too difficult. Most of the paddling was fairly easy with the wind pushing us from the south. We were looking for a clayey layer exposure known for producing prolific quantities of common fossils of mixed types - Miocene and Pleistocene material intermingled and then compacted into a tight cemented matrix. This material falls out of the sandy banks and into the river, where it breaks apart into gravel, fossils, and sand. There are several of these exposures along the Gardner stretch in both directions from the ramp, but each one has a slightly different character and mix of fossils. Some are heavier on Miocene material and some are heavier on Pleistocene, but all are mixed from being reworked over long periods of time by river action. Before the fossil spots, we passed the entrance to Charlie Creek. You can't really tell from this photo (below), but the water is less than waist deep here. Charlie Creek is on the right and the main channel of the Peace is on the left. We didn't explore Charlie Creek today and we kept going. Finally, we found the first part of the exposure I was looking for. Flood action has lengthened the visible exposure and there was a gravel bed present that was missing on my previous trips. You can see it in the photo below as the dark stripe on the lighter-colored sandy bottom. The sun was lighting up the water and it had the color of weak tea. Here there was a fossiliferous layer of rocky-clayey matrix weathering into the river channel. You can see it as a white layer in the sandy bank in the photo below. There were shovel holes and a few spoil piles in the area, so other hunters had already visited this spot. The holes and piles looked fairly fresh, so it was likely within the the last few days. Still, the exposure is productive and a lot of new material is crumbling out the bank and ending up in the river. There is a lot of gravel and clay lumps to sift. Digging test holes along the water-line yielded a mix of small common fossils - dugong ribs, small shark teeth, megalodon teeth, turtle scutes, mammoth ivory fragments, mammoth tooth fragments, horse/camel/bison teeth, and the occasional vertebra/skull. I was hoping to find some nice intact megalodon or mammoth teeth. I found small pieces of both, but no large intact examples. Here are a couple of in-situ photos. In the first, you can see a nice bluish-colored shark tooth weathering out of the sandy matrix. In the second photo, you can see a piece of bone coming out of the matrix material - which is crumbly and loosely-consolidated with pieces of varying sizes. My wife was still not feeling too great physically, so she mainly surface-collected along the water-line while I shoveled a ton of sifters worth of gravel. I found a lot of dugong ribs. It was an All You Can Eat Ribs Special and I filled up a sack with them before I stopped picking them up. I left a bunch behind - just too many to mess with. I would work a spot for about 30-45 minutes and then move on further upstream searching out more exposures to sample. We sampled four different spots along a roughly mile to mile and a half stretch. All told, we spent about six hours on the river. Eventually, we turned around and decided to head back to the ramp to beat rush hour going back into Tampa. We had a leisurely, slow, and pleasant float back downstream to the ramp. On the entire trip, we only saw two other sets of humans. One was a husband-wife fishing duo who passed us in a flat-bottomed bass boat with a small outboard motor. The other was a group of three locals fishing from chairs near the ramp when we got back. Surprisingly, we only saw one small gator near the confluence with Charlie Creek. We did see and hear lots of birds though, which was nice. Here is some of the stuff we found. Some is still drying out. Big chunks of micro-matrix are on the right - those will be searched later from home. Lots of ribs in the foreground. Lots of bone chunks and oddballs on the left in the rear. Unfortunately, I didn't find a single intact megalodon. The half-tooth in the photo was a tease. I saw it sticking up out of the sandy bottom and was excited when I reached down for it. I was disappointed when it was only half! LOL.

The wife and I went to Gardner yesterday (report and photos will be forthcoming), and I found a bunch of stuff. This is an oddball that I am not sure about. Something about it says to me "pleistocene megafauna" - it has a wood-grainy texture on the less-damaged portion. It's broken, but I am hoping that the position of the hole and shape might be diagnostic. Does anyone know what critter this comes from?