What do YOU see?
I met a young man who said he had a mosasaur tooth that had been IDed by a paleontologist from the U of Minnesota. I took one look at it and thought “horn coral”. It was collected near Rochester at an Ordovician outcrop, but what do I know compared to a real paleontologist?!
Now, Minnesota has a lot of marine cretaceous even though very few finds in that time period – a few hadrosaur bones are all that I can find in the literature for cretaceous fossil finds in Minnesota.
However, this area was covered by the waters of the Great Warren River System that drained the glaciers and we have had 4 glacial covers in the past 200,000 years. Both could have brought fossils down from various formations to our north. Best to keep an openmind. I took pictures and posted them on thefossilforum.com
Mosasaur Tooth in the Ordovician thread link: http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/59012-mosasaur-tooth-in-the-ordovician/?p=629211
Long story short, everyone IDed it as an Ordovician horn coral. I even contacted my paleotologist friend, Carl Mehling, who IDed it as a horn coral and gave his perspective on IDs.
Thefossilforum.com is a virtual fossil museum online and has amazing fossil authorities from around the world! THE best place to get a fossil IDed!
Also, if you go to the Gallery on the top bar and type in what you are looking for “mosasaur tooth” or “horn coral” you will find a wide array of excellent photographs of real fossils.
I once had a professor of Geology at Winona State University ID a sandstone concretion I had found as a dinosaur egg – had it on the mantel for years in a glass case. It was IDed on TFF as a concretion. As I have hunted in the Ordovician so much, I now see these oval sandstone concretions quite often along with amazing sandstone “sculptures”.
Need an ID? Become a member of thefossilforum.com, take good pictures from all sides with a reference for scale such as a coin, where you found it, and in what formation and with luck someone, or plenty of fossil enthusiasts, will ID it for you. If you have something truly extraordinary they will even help route you to the top expert in the field. 🙂
