darrow Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 I was actually out playing with a new telephhoto lens with no intention of looking for fossils... just so happened it was low tide right after a cold front. Found three other mammoth tooth fragments and other misc. bone fragments and bits of tusk. The place is littered with large Whelk shells but this is the first time I've seen one of these... Darrow 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Auspex Posted January 5, 2014 Share Posted January 5, 2014 Serendipity, indeed! "There has been an alarming increase in the number of things I know nothing about." - Ashleigh Ellwood Brilliant “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” - Thomas Henry Huxley >Paleontology is an evolving science. >May your wonders never cease! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AeroMike Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 I love it when I find mamoth or mastodon material. " This comment brought to you by the semi-famous AeroMike" Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uncle Siphuncle Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 that mammoth tooth has high grade preservation compared to most of what i've picked up. Grüße, Daniel A. Wöhr aus Südtexas "To the motivated go the spoils." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjaak Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 (edited) Nice! I am not familiar with American elephants, but I think this is not Woolly mammoth but another type of elephant. Edited January 6, 2014 by sjaak Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mrieder79 Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 What good luck. Congrats on a nice find. Luck is the most important skill of a fossil diver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Plax Posted January 6, 2014 Share Posted January 6, 2014 any chance that concretionary material is crabby? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 any chance that concretionary material is crabby? I've broken a few open on occasion but never found anything in them. Occasionally some take the form of septarian nodules and quite a few are torus shaped (remarkably symetric you'd think it was a bagle from a few feet away. The area is very late pleistocene, USGS description is below I'm not eitirely sure they distinguish "nodule" and "concretion"... On McAllen-Brownsville Sheet (1976) dominantly clay and mud of low permeability. (from Moore and Wermund, 1993a, 1993b): Light- to dark-gray and bluish- to greenish-gray clay and silt, intermixed and interbedded; contains beds and lenses of fine sand, decayed organic matter, and many buried organic-rich, oxidized soil(?) zones that contain calcareous and ferruginous nodules. Very lt. gray to v. lt. yell-gray sediment cemented by calcium carbonate present in varied forms, veins, laminar zones, burrows, root casts, nodules. Locally, small gypsum crystals present. Includes plastic and compressible clay and mud deposited in flood basins, coastal lakes, and former stream channels on a deltaic plain. Disconformably overlies Lissie Fm. Thickness 5-10 m along north edge of outcrop; thickens southward in subsurface to more than 100 m. Darrow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 that mammoth tooth has high grade preservation compared to most of what i've picked up. Compared to what I find on gravel bars just about all the material I pick up from dredge spoils is essentially perfect showing an amazing amount of very fine surface detail... except it almost always broken into lengths about 4 - 6 in. long but the dredge cutter head. Not sure which I prefer, a complete, but river tumbled piece with little surface detail remaining, or nice sized identifiable fragment with perfect detail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RickNC Posted January 7, 2014 Share Posted January 7, 2014 That looks like a nice spot. I'd be crawling over that place for hours. Are the welks fossilized? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 That looks like a nice spot. I'd be crawling over that place for hours. Are the welks fossilized? Because the large complete shells tend to be localized to with the fossil material, and they are always stained gray or yellow matching the Bearmont clay, I tend to believe they are probably very late pleistocene... But as the whelks grow, they tend to loose the distinctive "lightening" pattern becoming just a faded white color and would probably stain relatively quickly if buried in the clay in recent times. How do you distinguish a fossil whelk from a recent whelk, or any shell for that matter? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 7, 2014 Author Share Posted January 7, 2014 Had a chance to look at the material little closer yesterday and had I think 4 horse teeth, what might be part of a sloth tooth and part of the centrum from a mammoth vert. I'll post things in the fossil ID section after their done soaking. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bone2stone Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Right time right place. Nice to be first to find a hot spot that yields the detailed specimens. As many times as I have been to the area near Corpus I only had the pleasure of finding the Triumphs in great condition twice.. The whelks were so plentiful we gave lots of them to others along the beach at Mustang Island beach area. Only about 10% of them had the lightning markings. I was finding shark teeth too, did you happen across any? Congrats on the mammoth and horse stuff too. Bone2stone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lissa318 Posted January 9, 2014 Share Posted January 9, 2014 Oh I would be thrilled with the mammoth fragment! Nice and congrats. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 11, 2014 Author Share Posted January 11, 2014 I was finding shark teeth too, did you happen across any? Congrats on the mammoth and horse stuff too. Bone2stone I've found maybe 5 or 10 shark teeth within about a 5 mi. radius of the area and most of those appeared to be recent. It was an upland area with the coast 50 or 100 miles south during the late or end of the pleistocene. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 11, 2014 Author Share Posted January 11, 2014 ...the rest of the pleistobits. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 11, 2014 Author Share Posted January 11, 2014 this looked like a respectable tusk fragment until I picked it up... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 11, 2014 Author Share Posted January 11, 2014 an actual if much smaller tusk fragment, and what i've tentatively identified as a broken sloth tooth. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darrow Posted January 11, 2014 Author Share Posted January 11, 2014 a couple more mammoth tooth fragments. Almost missed the larger one because of the curved surface, thought it was a shell until I stooped down to pick up something beside it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rylawz Posted January 12, 2014 Share Posted January 12, 2014 The first mammoth tooth is either Colombian or imperial. Post your Proboscidea!!!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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