Help with interpreting fossils

[jrads]

Hi, 

Brand new to the site.  Any help would be appreciated.  I am a 6th grade Science teacher in suburban St. Louis.  About 8 years ago I attended a dig with the St. Louis Science center to the Hell Creek formation outside of Jordan, Montana.  I brought several fossils home to use in my classroom.  I would love to get more information about them.  My students absolutely love hearing about them and the more details the better!  The first set of images was identified as being part of Triceratops frill.  I can see the blood grooves in the bone. There also appears to be fossilized blood vessels on the surface of the bone.  One starts at one side of the frill, travels through the frill and comes out the other side.  Can blood vessels fossilize?  Am I interpreting that correctly?  Also on the "back" side of the fossil there appears to be a lot of dark almost granular material.  At first I thought it was something organic (lichens) from the site where I found it.  It is definitely fossilized and not something I can scrape off.  Any ideas what that is?

 

The second fossil is still unidentified.  I was not able to get information about it on our trip from the paleontologist.  Any information would be awesome!  Thank you!

[ynot]

Welcome to TFF!

The black stuff is probably a mineral encrusting the fossil.

 

@Troodon @-Andy- @jpc

 may be able to help You.

[LordTrilobite]

I have some Edmontosaur fossils with very similar "black stuff" on it. It's very difficult to scrape off. But under a microscope it's very clear that it's soft and spongy. So yeah, my guess it a type of lichen, not part of the original fossil.

 

Blood vessels themselves don't really fossilise. But holes in bone that originally held blood vessel can be preserved in fossilisation, and what sometimes also happens is that the iron in the blood can stay in place so that these openings in bones will be filled with localised iron rich matrix.

[-Andy-]

I don't know what the black stuff is since none of my fossils have it.

 

Blood vessels do not fossilize. These frills are bone, to which the skin was closely adhered; hence the heavy vascularization which may be interpreted as "blood vessels".

 

All I can tell you is that the second fossil is a piece of dino bone. We often call these unidentified pieces chunkosaurs.

[LordTrilobite]

Here's an example of the similar black stuff I mentioned on one of my Edmontosaurus bones. It's soft on this one.

 

[bottlesaurus]

Maybe it is a carbon film

[jpc]

LordT's explanation of the blood vessels is spot on.  

 

the triangular cross section of the second bone suggests to me that this is probably a piece of scapula, but I cannot say which animal.