Weasel shows his BONE! (Fossil collection, that is)

[ThunderWeasel]

Last for tonight, we have a skeleton of Compsognathus longipes, a tiny dinosaur known from the Solnhofen limestones of Bavaria as well as fossil remains found in France. Those who have seen Jurassic Park: The Lost World will surely remember these little guys.

The animal's skull is situated above its pelvis. This is due to postmortem contraction of the neck ligaments, pulling the head backwards.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Now we're getting into the serious, full-sized skulls in my collection. Here's Herrerasaurus ischigualastensis, a very early dinosaur from the middle Triassic of Argentina. Currently, many researchers consider it to be the most primitive member of Theropoda. It had a rare feature among dinosaurs, a flexible joint in the lower jaw that enabled to to deliver a grasping bite.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

OK, time to wrap up my photo additions to this thread. (For now, anyway.. once I get the baby Protoceratops skeleton remounted, I'll add him.)

We'll start off with a couple of oddball fossil replicas. Jurassic period dragonflies, from the Solnhofen limestones of Bavaria.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Next up, the skull & an articulated foot fossil of Velociraptor. Not as big as you'd expect from seeing Jurassic Park, is he? We'll cover that in my next post in the thread.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Here's the Velociraptor skull again, next to the skull of its North American relative, Deinonychus. The "raptors" in Jurassic Park were closer in size to Deinonychus. Also, no dromaeosaur could open doors as the movie raptors were show doing. Their wrists did not bend that way. They had a semilunate (half-moon-shaped) bone in their wrists that resulted in the arms folding up like a bird's wing. This has led to a theory that the flight motion in a bird's wing is a modification of the arm motion that dromaeosaurs might have used to grab prey. There is also some question as to whether birds descended from a type of dromaeosaur, or if dromaeosaurs were really birds that had lost the power of flight, as some modern birds such as the ostrich have.

(Once again, both skulls are replicas.)

 

[ThunderWeasel]

We now leave the age of dinosaurs behind, and move to more recent times. This is a replica of the skull of Barbourofelis loveorum, a Miocene epoch sabertoothed predator known from fossils found in the Love Field bone bed in Alachua County, Florida. Photos of the actual fossils and more info on the species can be found here: http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/vertpaleo/fossilspeciesBarbourofelisloveorum.htm

This animal was a nimravid, not a true cat.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Here's a skull replica of the sabertoothed cat Smilodon gracilis. This skull is a replica of one found at the old Leisey Shell Pit near Ruskin Florida back in the 1980s.

More info on the species can be found here: http://ufdc.ufl.edu/UF00095816/

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Wrapping things up, here are photos of a few more real fossils from my collection.

Top row, left to right: The lower end of a bobcat humerus, a horse canine tooth and a horse molar. These were all collected my me at the new-closed Caloosa Shell Pit near Ruskin, Florida about 15 years ago. The site was dated by the University of Florida as being from the Irvingtonian North American Land Mammal Age, from 1,800,000 til 240,000 years ago.

Middle row, left to right: Whale ear bone from the Peace River, giant armadillo Holmesina floridanus armor plate, and the upper end of an ulna from a sabertoothed cat from the Peace River.

At the bottom is a section of a mammoth tooth that I found in the Peace River.

Here's a view of the grinding surface of the mammoth tooth section.

Last, here's a closer view of the fossils at the top of the picture.

That's about it for my fossil show, unless I find more that I've packed away somewhere and forgotten about. Hope you all enjoyed it!

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Just ran across a couple of replica skeletons that I forgot about having. Had them stashed in the back of my closet. (Cue "skeletons in closet" joke... anyway... )

Ichthyosaur skeleton. I forgot to put a ruler in the pic for scale, the skeleton is about 3 feet long.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Here's the pterosaur Campylognathoides liasicus. This is a replica of the fossil known as the "Pittsburgh specimen", which is housed in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA. Again, I forgot to include a ruler for scale. The skeleton is almost 2 feet in length.

 

[Red7227]

Episode 14 of Elementary in the second season is about an archaeological find.

Its rather underestimates the tenacity of archaeologists when it suggests smashing a fossil into 1,000 pieces would make any difference to an archaeologist - reassembling things like that is what undergraduates are for.

 

[camstory]

Very nice collection! I had a necklace made with 3 shark's teeth I collected from a sandstone formation near Santa Cruz Ca. The strata where these teeth were found had been dated to about 750,000 years ago, as i remember it. Over the course of five years i made maybe 25 trips to this quarry and found maybe 2 dozen shark's teeth, but most were very small.

The necklace was stolen along with everything else from my storage about 20 years ago. Lot of more valuable stuff in that storage, but the necklace was maybe the biggest lose.

Again, nice collection, thanks for sharing.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Oh man, I know the feeling. I lost a bunch of nearly perfect fossil Hemipristis & Tiger shark teeth, and now I'm moving away from the river where I could collect more.

Oh well... at least at the new place I'll be near another river that's known for mosasaur fossils.

 

[JerryBoBerry]

I'm gathering this would be of interest here. 248 million year old fossil of a reptile giving birth.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...at-lasted-248-million-years.html#.Uv_7Gr0fV8E

What a moment to preserve in time. Scientists have discovered a fossil capturing what could be the oldest live reptilian birth – 10 million years older than those seen before.

The Chaohusaurus was a giant marine reptile that lived about 248 million years ago. It looked a little like a cross between a dolphin and a lizard, with flippers but no dorsal fin. In this exceptional specimen, discovered in a quarry in Anhui, China, you can clearly see a live birth – the baby ichthyosaur's head has just exited its mother's pelvis. There are at least two other offspring involved in the birth: one is still inside the mother's body, the other lays beside her.

Although it marks a sad end for this family, this fossil gives us a striking insight into the possible development of reptiles. The headfirst position of the offspring indicates that, contrary to what was previously thought, Chaohusaurus births may have taken place on land, because most aquatic births occur tail-first.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Just made my first fossil finds in the Sulphur River. Site is dated to 80 million years ago. Found a couple of shells, a broken sand shark tooth and several pieces of ammonite shell. Pics to come when I'm not exhausted from stomping around the river bottom.

 

[EdgarAllenWhoa]

Very cool stuff Weasel...thats a remarkable collection of fossils


Color me a little green of jealousy


More pics BB...they are hawt.


Seriously, more pic because they are pretty amazing.


:character-hobbes:

 

[ThunderWeasel]

OK, my first finds from the Sulphur River:

Above the tape measure, left to right: What MAY be a piece of mammoth tooth enamel from the ice age layers along the river, 2 gastropod shells, a broken-off tip of a sand shark tooth & some as-yet-unidentified piece, possibly another shell fragment.

Below the tape measure are pieces of baculite shells. These are straight-shelled cephalopods, similar to the coiled-shell ammonites & nautilus. You can make out the characteristic suture lines between the shell segments very clearly on some of them.

All of these fossils (except for the mammoth tooth enamel, if that's what it is) are around 80 million years old.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

And this is what the riverbed looked like. Just FYI.

 

[ThunderWeasel]

Today's finds:

Mosasaur vertebra and partial tooth of the fish Enchodus. (What the hell is an Enchodus? This. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enchodus)

Baculite shell fragment showing nice suture lines.

OMG! THE SHADOW OF THE WEASEL IS UPON THE RIVER!