A list of things that looked like fossil bone from a distance, but on closer examination turned out not to be

Monday, July 18, 2011




Well after that title, this should really be pretty self explanatory. One thing that is worth noting as it applies to almost every one of these things is just how amazingly convincing some things are. More than once I took pieces to people with years and even decades of field experience and a couple of times a debate ensured over whether or not it really was fossil bone.

When you see something at a distance, even just a few metres away, you go and check it out, and while its mostly easy to tell almost instantly once you have picked up the item in question, it is still a pain. When that means a long walk or a tricky climb to get to some inaccessible smudge that might just be bone, it can get very annoying and waste a lot of your time. And of course it is very easy to do, since you are actively looking for bones that might be broken, eroded, distorted and stained or bleached and thus not look mch like what you might expect, meaning you have to check out something that looks only very vaguely like bone, just in case it is. Add to that the huge range of shapes that one does expect (think teeth, jaws, ribs, bits of vertebrae, parts of skulls etc.) and of course pretty much anything white on the surface becomes worth checking out.

For more information related to dinosaurs, visit rareresource.com.

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