De Zandmotor, Netherlands - Amateur Hour

[ronkefeller]

I was recently in the Netherlands for a work trip and made a point of spending a couple of days out at De Zandmotor. Most of what I found was pretty fragmentary -- the beach was busy on both days, the tides weren't favorable for hunting, and my eye is not well-trained to distinguish bone from shell. I currently live in Washington, and opportunities to beach comb for fossils like this are limited.

 

At the end of the first day, as I was on my way out, I decided to start pulling things out of the water that the surf hadn't quite managed to throw all the way up onto the shore, in hopes there might be something more interesting in there.

 

I believe I got very lucky in doing so, as I pulled out what appears to me to be a pretty well-preserved woolly rhinoceros tooth. As soon as I saw the crown my soul left my body -- this is by far my coolest find ever,

 

Photos of my finds are attached, including several of this tooth. Most of them are too fragmentary to easily ID, especially to my amateur eye, although it appears to me that a couple of them are the broken-off ends of limb bones. One of them, #8, appears to me like it could be some other type of tooth, perhaps rodent, although what would be the chewing surface is quite thin. I intend to post additional photos of the stuff I couldn't identify later. It's tough to get good lightning where I am currently.