Hunting my closet

[Shellseeker]

After Saturday's adventure,  I have spent the last 3 days cleaning out my Study and/or Fossil room in preparation for young visitors arriving Thursday on 10 day vacation.  i.e my granddaughters.  I had EXTRA incentives.  If I managed to remove large amounts of fossils in boxes and ziploc bags, plus the collection of clothes I have bought over the last 25 years, plus boxes and boxes of genealogical documents and photos,  I could go hunting tomorrow. It was not easy but nothing like a definite goal to drive an addicted fossil hunter.  The real trick was not to get too involved in the material I was throwing out, giving away to the local fossil clubs or to my frequent hunting partner. He does not know it yet but he is getting bags of goodies in the morning. I have always kept lots of fossils I should not have and in this process was removing/donating about 80% of content by weight. 

Here are a couple of the goodies just laying in a ziploc bag in my closet.

A Equine medial phalanx, in GREAT shape... look at the fine lines that have survived some 3 myas.. 

I find it odd that the articulation facet to the proximal phalanx is really leaning to the right. Does that imply a pathology or identify where this belonged to a left or right leg... Questions... questions

and now for one of those excellent excellent pictures from @Harry Pristis.  This is why I save most of them to my local disk.

 

 

At 20 x 13 mm, mine is slightly smaller,  which makes some sense because my most common find for Tridactyl horses was Nannippus, either peninsulatus from the Pliocene or aztecus from the Miocene.

 

Here is another find sitting in a ziploc... A Great White...

 

Great whites are rare in my hunting grounds and I always like to find them.  Something with the fossilization process or the location where this one was placed in,  took away the gleaming enamel. After not finding anything as large as this for years,  I have grown a greater appreciation. 

 

A couple of weeks back I found a Dolphin jaw without teeth, and noting the small size of the Alveoli,  wondered if the corresponding small teeth might have slipped thru my screens. 

 

I am unsure which end is anterior/posterior but it seems that teeth would slant forward or backwards. 

So, last 3 days while going thru old fossils ,  I looked for smaller dolphin teeth..

 

The longer , thinner one with the broken enamel tip seems to "fit".  This tooth is 27 mm in length.. 

 

Not sure what this means. Although I speculate a lot, not willing to speculate on whether this tooth actually fits the species of this jaw.  In the initial posting , I thought the jaw could be from Pomatodelphis ineaqualis ,  but that dolphin has rather distinctive teeth.

More like the other tooth I tried to fit into the jaw. 

 

As Always,  comments & discussions greatly appreciated.  

xx

[minnbuckeye]

9 hours ago, Shellseeker said:

to my frequent hunting partner.

 

Looks like I need to visit more often to qualify as "frequent"! Have fun with the Granddaughters.