Hunting a Miocene Creek

[Shellseeker]

I had a chance to go out and chose a Miocene Creek in Bone Valley that has delivered for me in the past, but has had some extensive hunting by lots of others. 

I have 3 or 4 locations that are "special", the 1st was just OK (small teeth including a few sandtigers,  but the 2nd and 3rd locations were basically cleaned out.  My last location still had a few small teeth and Ray dermals but not what I was looking for... After 2 hours I had not found one of those wowzers.   Then this screen or I should say shovel full. That is correct ... 1 Shovel full.. 40 mm Meg in center, 40 mm gold Hemipristis on the left,  broken whale tooth upper right and a yellow Sandtiger lower right... Now THAT's more like it.

 

Just a belief that , whatever else happens,  I would find a untouched pocket of fossils...

This tooth is unusual... because most of what I am finding is marine fauna

 

I have my mind on Miocene and I see the cracked enamel,  so I figure it has to be old... but finally decide it is Bovid, an upper tooth.  May not be big enough for Bison.. Only leaves Modern cow,  but what about that cracked enamel..  How long does that take?  How old can it be.. 150 years ? 

Back to some Miocene

 

Here is everything... A day that greatly exceeds expectations

[Fossil_Adult]

Wow! What a haul man! Congrats, I would be over the moon with any of those finds on their own. Bone valley produces some stunning teeth. 

[digit]

8 hours ago, Shellseeker said:

Then this screen or I should say shovel full. That is correct ... 1 Shovel full.. 40 mm Meg in center, 40 mm gold Hemipristis on the left,  broken whale tooth upper right and a yellow Sandtiger lower right... Now THAT's more like it.

That's what keeps feeding the addiction.

 

Wonderful "in situ" photo of the sifting screen.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Titan]

Congrats, epic haul! 

[RJB]

Love the little meg!

 

RB

[Jaybot]

Nice haul!  Funny how some days are like that..nothing...nothing....NOTHING.... then, BOOM, a tripmaker find(s).

The coloring on that meg is pretty neat, sort of looks like it's shaded on the edges.

[Shellseeker]

On 7/2/2024 at 11:15 PM, Fossil_Adult said:

Wow! What a haul man! Congrats, I would be over the moon with any of those finds on their own. Bone valley produces some stunning teeth. 

Thank you.  After years of hunting Florida, I tend to agree although there are great fossil areas in the Carolinas, Virginia, Maryland, and in your general vicinity.  This is pretty much true around the country.  We are blessed with fossil riches,  just need the time to go and find them. 

[Shellseeker]

On 7/3/2024 at 10:13 AM, Jaybot said:

The coloring on that meg is pretty neat, sort of looks like it's shaded on the edges.

I am unsure what causes the shading... It occurs in one tooth out of hundreds.  Anything unique is appreciated.  

[Shellseeker]

I posted this thread a couple of days ago and did not have time to keep it undated.  Life intrudes. 

Here is a modern jaw and I am unsure of the ID..  Bumps rather than teeth as molars ? Suggestions?

 

Also the Bovid tooth which I think is an upper right M2...

 

 

So the old question,  cow or bison? Not a lot of enamel above those roots. 

On this thread , 3 years back, an upper Bison Molar... Antiquus .sp

https://www.thefossilforum.com/topic/113952-bison-antiquus-upper-left-molar/

 

But this tooth looks VERY different... 

LOTS of enamel above the roots... 

 

 

This tooth from 2021 looks very different,  and I am starting to get confused.  Maybe @Harry Pristis can help sort this out...

Jack

[Meganeura]

16 minutes ago, Shellseeker said:

I posted this thread a couple of days ago and did not have time to keep it undated.  Life intrudes. 

Here is a modern jaw and I am unsure of the ID..  Bumps rather than teeth as molars ? Suggestions?

 

Also the Bovid tooth which I think is an upper right M2...

 

 

So the old question,  cow or bison? Not a lot of enamel above those roots. 

On this thread , 3 years back, an upper Bison Molar... Antiquus .sp

https://www.thefossilforum.com/topic/113952-bison-antiquus-upper-left-molar/

 

But this tooth looks VERY different... 

LOTS of enamel above the roots... 

 

 

This tooth from 2021 looks very different,  and I am starting to get confused.  Maybe @Harry Pristis can help sort this out...

Jack

I think the jaw is muskrat? And just missing the teeth? 
 

also I missed commenting originally - those Megs are gorgeous!!!

Edited Thursday at 11:28 PM by Meganeura

[Shellseeker]

1 minute ago, Meganeura said:

I think the jaw is muskrat? And just missing the teeth? 

Thank you and curious.  I thought it was modern and seems to have no obvious damage,  yet all the teeth are missing.  ???

[Meganeura]

49 minutes ago, Shellseeker said:

Thank you and curious.  I thought it was modern and seems to have no obvious damage,  yet all the teeth are missing.  ???

I’ll have to take pics of my muskrat jaws in the morning - but I’ve got a few that look like the teeth are just… sat in the jaw with no holding them in place! It’s quite strange. 

[Shellseeker]

Got this photo of Muskrat Jaws...  Are there different species of muskrat ? What are the set of fauna that exist in Florida and could be identified as Muskrat?

Quote

The genus Neofiber first appears in the fossil record in the middle Pleistocene of North America in the form of the extinct Leonard’s muskrat, Neofiber leonardi (Hibbard, 1943; Frazier, 1977). Neofiber leonardi is known from fossils in Texas, the Great Plains, Virginia, and Florida (Frazier, 1977; Kasper, 1992). The oldest fossils of Neofiber alleni are from the late Irvingtonian Coleman 2A locality in Sumter County, Florida (Matin, 1974). Based on the similarity and overlapping degrees of variation in the morphology of the teeth through time, it is thought that Neofiber alleni evolved from Neofiber leonardi sometime in the middle Pleistocene (Frazier, 1977; Kasper, 1992). Currently, Neofiber is restricted to Florida and southeastern Georgia, possibly due to their reliance on warm aquatic habitats (Frazier, 1977). But its range was much wider in the Pleistocene.

 

 

Mine looks to be a Muskrat jaw,  just with a lot fewer teeth .   @digit may know something about Florida rats !!!!

[digit]

11 hours ago, Shellseeker said:

Mine looks to be a Muskrat jaw,  just with a lot fewer teeth .   @digit may know something about Florida rats !!!!

 

12 hours ago, Shellseeker said:

Here is a modern jaw and I am unsure of the ID..  Bumps rather than teeth as molars ? Suggestions?

 

I do know a little about Florida muskrats only because I recovered a nicely mineralized jaw from the Peace a number of years ago and donated it to the FLMNH when Richard Hulbert identified it for me. We brought some oddities to Richard when we popped into the museum on a stop along a roadtrip to North Carolina where I was going to dive the Meg Ledges. The collection also got a turtle jaw and a lagomorph (rabbit/hare) jaw as well. Richard identified mine as Neofiber alleni which is extant and has been around since the Pleistocene.

 

The "teeth" on your modern specimen look odd because the jaw is edentulous (a fancy word meaning toothless). The teeth on these muskrats are usually well secured and most fossil specimens tend to have most or all of the molars as well as the long curved incisor.

 

https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/florida-vertebrate-fossils/species/neofiber-alleni/

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round-tailed_muskrat

 

This muskrat is a member of the Cricetidae family. The family contains other familiar members like the pet shop hamster as well as voles and lemmings. I find tiny cricetid molars and incisors occasionally while picking through micro-matrix from the Montbrook site. Younger sites often produce S-shaped sigmodontid rodent molars.

 

And that about covers what I know about Florida fossil mice/rats.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Shellseeker]

45 minutes ago, digit said:

a roadtrip to North Carolina where I was going to dive the Meg Ledges.

The ledges ??? Rumor was that only crazy risk takers went to the Ledges  !!!!

 

[digit]

Yup. It was quite an exciting trip. It had rained heavily in Wilmington, NC the week before we arrived. There was still several inches of water flooding many of the lower streets. Tammy is not a fan of sitting on a boat for hours in high seas so she (wisely) remained on shore and read books on her iPad and enjoyed the area around our hotel. I, on the other hand, got up with 5 other loonies (one a member of this forum who invited me on this trip) and arrived at our boat at the crack of dawn. We motored out of the harbor and the ended up turning around before long as the swells and unsettled seas that followed the storm which dropped the torrential rain made it a no-go. We finally got out but only made it to the 85ft ledges at first as the seas were still so choppy that the traveling was slow. The final day of the week we made it all the way out to the 140ft ledge. Being well offshore with swells that were taller than the boat we were on, it was critical to maintain contact with the vessel at all times. When we jumped in off the dive deck we followed a line rigged under the hull from the dive deck to the bow of the boat. From there we followed down the anchor line and clipped-off a line reel to swim off onto the sand flat. There is really nothing down there but sand and algae (and of course fossils buried under a light coating of sand) so natural navigation is not an option to return to the boat. That's the reason for the line reel. If we were moving we'd have to roll up the line at the end of the dive. If we were staying (and we were being productive where we were hunting) we could leave the spool where we finished and follow the line back to the anchor. Decompression safety stops were done hanging on the anchor line as current could sweep you away from the boat and you'd never spot it at the surface due to the height of the waves. Even on Nitrox (32% oxygen enriched air) we had less than half an hour on our dives. An hour onboard between the dives let us offgas a bit before our next (progressively shorter) dive. The dives were not long and we were making the most of every minute on the bottom. We'd toss any finds into our mesh bags and sort through them during our surface intervals. No time to even look at what we were finding. Felt like one of those game shows where you have a shopping cart and 60 seconds to fill it.

 

It was a fun experience though expensive and a bit dangerous. It could be easy to neglect checking your air supply or bottom time which could lead to drowning or decompression sickness (the bends)--either of which is not good hours off shore in high seas. Previous to our trip there was a dive fatality so the operators of these charters were being even more cautious than usual.

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

 

P.S.: Those with nothing better to do on this long holiday weekend might enjoy a recounting of this epic trip:

 

https://www.thefossilforum.com/topic/87495-epic-carolinas-roadtrip/

 

[dries85]

20 hours ago, Shellseeker said:

So the old question,  cow or bison? Not a lot of enamel above those roots. 

Just a thought, but someone (i believe it was @Balance) told me it would be not very likely for a wild animal to get old enough to wear off it's molars.. Don't know if that goes up for bison, or would there be something like domestic bison? Just trying to apply what i've learned here so far at the risk of talking nonsense 😅

 

Let's stick to what i know: Nice plate of shark teeth! Love the megs and whale tooth, and it's good to see someone else pick up all the bits and pieces too.

 

Grtz,

Dries

[digit]

9 minutes ago, dries85 said:

Just trying to apply what i've learned here so far at the risk of talking nonsense 😅

 That's how we learn here.

 

I do know that proboscideans go through 6 sets of replacement teeth (one tooth in each quarter jaw). Modern elephants start breaking in their sixth and final set around age 25 or so and that set has to last them the rest of their lives (or they starve due to being toothless). Most animals succumb to something else but I imagine a few don't die from disease, predation, or lack of food starvation and might get to the point where they starve due to not being able to process their food. Herbivores in the wild that feed on plant material which is mixed in with very abrasive sands can wear their teeth down faster than the same species fed in a zoo on clean material devoid of abrasive contaminants.

 

 

Cheers.

 

-Ken

[Shellseeker]

9 hours ago, digit said:

It was a fun experience though expensive and a bit dangerous. It could be easy to neglect checking your air supply or bottom time which could lead to drowning or decompression sickness (the bends)--either of which is not good hours off shore in high seas. Previous to our trip there was a dive fatality so the operators of these charters were being even more cautious than usual. Cheers. -Ken

 

P.S.: Those with nothing better to do on this long holiday weekend might enjoy a recounting of this epic trip:

 

https://www.thefossilforum.com/topic/87495-epic-carolinas-roadtrip/

 

Really impressive,  Ken Very interesting 1st hand account.  Thanks for sharing and the link you provide is a great read !!!  and photos like these... just Wowsers

[Shellseeker]

3 hours ago, dries85 said:

Just a thought, but someone (i believe it was @Balance) told me it would be not very likely for a wild animal to get old enough to wear off it's molars.. Don't know if that goes up for bison, or would there be something like domestic bison? Just trying to apply what i've learned here so far at the risk of talking nonsense 😅

 

Mostly , if I have the time,  I try to learn every thing I can about a find.  I am thinking this one is most likely a cow tooth, so modern.  specifically a M2 upper right molar of Bos Taurus.. You can see the comparison above and it has some unique features.  Also at APL 34 mm, it is larger than I would expect for cow.  There are domestic Bison in Florida but I believe they were introduced for meat less than 50 years ago.

[Jaybot]

58 minutes ago, Shellseeker said:

Wowsers

I second that wowsers.. incredible