🔎 UNIDENTIFIED Fossil tooth

[fishstick]

Howdy y'all, found this over the weekend while out kayaking. Google search says it might be from a ice age horse. I've always thgt that they didn't appear in NA until the Spaniards showed up. Any thgts?

 

[Red-Coat]

It's definitely a horse molar, but not easy to date.

Horses originally evolved in North America (the wild horse Equus ferus and several species of stilt-legged horse - notably Equus francisci and Equus calobatus), but they seem to have undergone several extinctions and re-populations back from Eurasia. They were finally hunted (maybe) to extinction at the end of the last ice age, around 10,000-12,000 years ago. Horses had never been domesticated by early native Americans and were regarded primarily as food.

At the beginning of what is known as the “Columbian Exchange” when all kinds of new species of animals and plants were introduced to the Americas, there were no horses of any kind on the American continent. Horses (domesticated ones) were effectively reintroduced to the mainland by the conquistador Cortés in 1519 via the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and a little later by De Coronado via New Mexico and De Soto via Florida around 1539-1540.

It's not posible to say from the pictures that it's definitely a fossil (and therefore pre-Columbian) but the balance of probability is that it's from a post-Columbian domesticated horse.

 

[fishstick]

You sir are Top Shelf!!!!! Thx Red

 

[Older The Better]

Yep red coat nailed the history I’d add and at some points some of the horses were tiny, like the size of house cat if I’m. Not mistaken not that your tooth is that small but if you’re doing a size comparison with modern horses teeth it can be misleading

 

[traveller777]

Howdy y'all, found this over the weekend while out kayaking. Google search says it might be from a ice age horse. I've always thgt that they didn't appear in NA until the Spaniards showed up. Any thgts?View attachment 2259129View attachment 2259130View attachment 2259131View attachment 2259132

Hello fishstick. Thanks for sharing. Red-Coat as usual gave a spot on analysis and identification of your find.
It might be helpful to further date your find to know more about the location of find. You stated found while kayaking. The location where kayaking, and was the tooth on a beach, river bed, imbedded in a bank of the stream? Has other fossils been found in the same area?

Again thanks for sharing. A nice find

 

[releventchair]

Check out wood bison teeth too.

 

[Almy]

From its appearance, I'm thinking it is a regular tooth, not a fossil. It would be possible to tell which, but would require some scraping or cutting damage to the tooth, which you might not want to do. There is a distinctive odor to heated tooth material, similar to the smell of heated bone. You've probably smelled the tooth odor when the dentist drills.