found vertebrate fossil

yeh, a macro lens would help to clear up some of the spots that seem most interesting. Im still reserving judgement . I have 3 possibilities

frontal and parietal sections of some mammal, but this is weird since the deposits around your area are marine. We dont have any teeth so that is a real bad break

a crab telson (the part thats articulated, there are a number of species that have telsons that look like parts of skulls)

a part of a small reptilian skull or the premaxilla, nasal, orbital and post orbital suture areas in something like a protosuchus (an old style alligator) probably a small one


One thing that would help is to take it to a college geology dept or chemistry dept and have them run an xray diffraction on the bone to see if its convereted fully to a compound that is made of calcium, flourine, and a phosphate called apatite. This would tell us how old (relatively) itd be.with the more flourine in the crystals. Using xray is non destructive, they can just shoot the beam at a fixed point on the fossil and the return energy is calibrated to the internal angles of any crystals that make up the fossil. Then theres an internal computer on the xraywhich will spit out the answers. Its real easy, just get out of the room with the beam on.

Im sorry that I cant tell much from the pix but it is interesting

hmm, logged back on to check in and the pics wont even display on my comp after displaying earlier. had to right click and click show picture repeatedly on some of them as many as five times before it displayed. just a note for anyone who can only see an X where a pic should be.

there is a local college museum that has a paleontology dept that might be able to help. someone suggested that if it were mammalia, then perhaps it simply washed into a stream, then the ocean, then back on land for me to find, thusly explaining how a land mammal skull came from the sea. they pondered such because parts of the skull are broken off, but simply embedded in the sandstone stuck to the bottom side. ill share any results from the college's museum with all you helpfuls :-) this is such a dandy little find for me and im really thankful for any assistance (technical or paleontology related, of course) in IDing it. after all, it didnt come with an info card like a fossil that you buy in a store :-D

thats what makes it fun. When you go to the paleo dept, theyll have a number of "keys" to use to identify it. Its interesting even though it was really fuzzy. The little Hole in the back That seemed to be sediment filled and the underside with its little pieces of embedded bone shards sez that this has been rolled around a lot or crushed when it was deposited.
There are some Near shore deposits in the Eocene through Miocene that had some little islands cropping out where animals like nutria or otters hung out, also reptiles and even some fish have very reptilian looking skulls. Im still leaving room that its the back end of a crab.
We always like multiple hypotheses until somebody nails it down. Hope you find what it is and we can play "STUMP THE CHUMPS". Im curious what it is

great shot of the small wings that might have protected eyes. see the boney ridges on said wings? :-)


see, why i go with it being a skull, those seem to be immovable joints there where the supposed cranial cavity is, much as a human skull has. identical design of said lines on each side, jagged and fused together. but i am amateur so i dare not venture to say i know.


maybe that small sand filled ridge on the right side is how it died, that would be neat.

no teeth... sinus holes possibly...

plenty of armor though...

oh, also it seems to be porous, and i was told only bone is porous, so hence my thoughts as to it being a skull. its also slightly curved and i was thinking that would indicate the animal had a slight hunch, unlike alligators of today. more similar to a rat's build. albeit a gator skull is way cooler... but just had a thought, what on earth is a long thin hole doing right in the center of the skull, obviously part of the animals design??? kind of odd...

sionix, please use image shack to host your images...right now they are all broken links except for the last picture.

It may be a mole skull because it appears to be lacking eye sockets

then again, I couldn't tell a penny from a quarter in this picture

well i went to imageshack and i saw no free posting, so a link on imageshack took me to image station. i figured imageshack was a conglomeration of links for free hosting pages and only a pay service themselves. if anyone truly wants to see the picture, right clicking and "show picture" and it will appear. i realize thats inconveniant, but its a very nifty skull :-)

I think mebbe you weren't actually at the real imageshack.us website (note the .US). Try this link - ImageShack. You'll be brought to a page that looks like this:









(You'll get the right website if you just click any of the above images, too)

The real ImageShack is free, devoid of yuckware, super easy to use, and doesn't even require registration, though with free registration, you'll get some enhanced functionality.

so are my new pics not displaying for others? they typically show up on my comp, rarely requiring the right click show picture command.

Some page visits they're there for me, others some or all of them fail to display, rendering instead as the box with a red "x" indicating a broken link. Dunno why - ImageStation, where you've got those, is legitimate and relatively big-time (though commercial) oughtta have plenty of bandwidth - odd.

Anyhow, I prefer ImageShack for lotsa reasons.

Oh - sometimes, when that happens on a web page, or a page otherwise fails to display correctly, you can fix it by "Forcing a page refresh", which you do by holding the Ctrl key and simultaneously pressing F5

some of the pix gave me an "ACCESS FORBIDDEN" sounds all Biblical.

Your computer has probably stored access cookies which allow the images to be displayed for you (but not for us).

argh, okay, ill be reposting with imageshack.US then. i did get the macro function going and they are better now, fused hair line cracks visible in skull and all. i had gone to imageshack.com the first time...

Well, whether or not we ever figure out what you've found, you've learned some stuff

The fact that you can describe the suture lines on the skull is encouraging. Because the orbits are surpressed and the fossil is roughly hand sized it could be a multituberculate. These are an evolutionary dead end group of mammals that, as big as a small cat , they had these "wings" on their upper and lower jaws for muscle attachment. They were powerful biters and probably ate and gnawed on wood as well as green plants. If you can see any molars, they were like loaded with rdiges and were used like mill stones to grind up the chew.
If its a multitubercukate or a triconodont , they are rare and should be taken to a museum for study. However, these were land animals and I doubt that the skull wshed down a stream and into the bay. The whole thing, from what I saw from your pix, doesnt show a lot of abrasion or rounding on the edges. I think that your first iidea was correct, that it was released from a marine deposit which had been submerged in place over time because the basin has sunken.

Are you sure it's a fossil and not a skull?

uh... yeah, pretty much, i mean im no pro but to believe its a typical skull would be overlooking all the evidence. sandstone lodge in its cranial cavity and underneath its mouth area doesnt occur all too promptly, of course, and its black from the carbon having been released as it degraded. its pretty much definitely a fossil.

okay, now that you mentioned muscle attachements to the wings; a wing on one side of its face ( a larger wing of which only one remains, other is gone. two small wings are on top of its head though as well) has a boney mass with a bit of curve to is, almost as though a muscle was once attached and left its mark from said attachment. hard to explain cuz im just me, but ill post the pics on imageshack later (gf coming over, no time :-) but wow, if this is rare and actually of interest i will just ack.... must stay reserved... seriously though, a wing does have a spot for muscle attachment. and the two small wings have ridges, as though to help a muscle hold strong onto them. also they are recurved to assist in holding. gotta run.

I think we got someone stoked up.

yeah yeah yeah heh. im for serious though, the "wings" truly seem to have formerly had muscles attached. the small ones are ridged and recurved backwards (both of which would massively help in muscle attachment) and the larger wing has a bone formation that amounts to no more than a very small ridge that sticks up a bit and when you see the pic, youll know what i mean. hard to explain. but whether or not its that cat type thing you mentioned, i dunno, but i truly believe these wings held muscles.