Hello, I showed this the on Native American Artifacts & someone suggested it might be a fossil of a Mammoth tooth?
Just wondering, any help would be appreciated!
8)
Thx
Phil
"What does not kill me, makes me stronger."
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The object doesn't look anything like a mastodon or a mammoth tooth to me. The unbroken side reminds me of a coprolite from a shark with a spiral cloacal valve. I don't know what to make of the splintered side 'cause the image is too dark.
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
--Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) in "The Sign of Four"
Yes, I considered the possibility of a mammoth fragment with the cementum still in place.
Now that I look closer at your image, I think I see a pattern of spikes - like teeth - on the rounded surface. You may have a shell fragment, or more likely, a fragment of a bivalve internal cast (or steinkern).
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
--Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) in "The Sign of Four"
From the angle, it looks like it belongs to an herbivore, and while it may be a molar, it looks like it came from a little closer to the front of the mouth. What are the dimensions? If it's thin, it may be a shell, but the patterns sure look like tooth cusps to me.
What do you all think about it being part of a fossilized ear of a porpoise or whale called the bulla. Below is a pic of a fossil whale bulla and notice the thin rounded area that kinda compares to your pic above. Just my opinion without seeing it in person.
Here are shark and other coprolites for comparison:
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
--Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) in "The Sign of Four"
Maybe the original pic is of crap or maybe an ear or maybe a tooth. It's a little hard to determine without seeing it in person. My thoughts on the ear bulla was because it appears to be quite thin. I have some coprolite but my pieces are from turtles and other small creatures so it looks nothing like the pieces I have.
Naw . . . forget all those wild guesses, including mine. This object is a section of steinkern of an ammonoid. I'm confident the broken faces would show more evidence of ammonoid.
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
--Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle) in "The Sign of Four"
Most of the ammonites you see are very orderly, precise, and proportioned in terms of the ribs and overall shape. But, there are some species out there that are anything but orderly and almost appear like genetic screwups with crazy random variations in ribs and what-not.