Are Prognathodon skulls rare and is this a real skull?

[heZZ]

[Thecosmilia Trichitoma]

Your piece is Composite. The teeth are real, but the rest is just carved bone glued together. Real complete Prognathodon skulls are rare.

[heZZ]

Okay, thanks for the answer

Edited January 27, 2020 by heZZ

[Pemphix]

Yes, the teeth are original.

I would stay away from this. Bad composite....

 

 

[LordTrilobite]

Most large vertebrate fossils are rare. A good complete skull of a Prognathodon would be rare yes. But among the Morocco mosasaurs, Prognathodon and Halisaurus seem to be among the more common genera.

 

Stay away from this skull though. As the others have said, it's a composite. But it's not all carved bone and real teeth.

At least a significant part of this skull is made up of real mosasaur skull bones. Most notably the left maxilla and premaxilla are real, though it a bit of a rough state. I'm also seeing some likely real parts on the braincase and the lower jaw. As composites go, this is slightly above the absolute worst as this still vaguely resembles the correct anatomy. The main issue with the reconstruction is the complete lack of the quadrate bones. The teeth, while real, are very mismatched. They have different sizes and colours. They don't seem to match each other at all.

 

I think it's most likely that this is originally a partial skull that was then badly reconstructed with extra teeth, skull bones and random bone to fill in the gaps.

[Mark Kmiecik]

The teeth are too regularly spaced and too regularly angled to be natural. Why are teeth on the other side of the skull visible through the eye socket? It is a composite that seems to have a different number of teeth on each side.

[LordTrilobite]

23 hours ago, Mark Kmiecik said:

Why are teeth on the other side of the skull visible through the eye socket?

That's actually one thing this composite has mostly correct.

Mosasaurs do have an extra set of teeth in their mouth. These are the pterygoid teeth.

[ScienceGirl]

On 1/27/2020 at 8:25 AM, heZZ said:

It is composite but pretty nice piece! I would love to have one of those!!!

[Flx]

Hm... one of the fascinating things (to me at least) about prognatodon skulls is that the lower jaw has a "jaw--joint"

This feature is missing here.