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Fossil ? for nonres or greywolf

Shovelbuck

Shovelbuck

Active Member
Do either one of you or anyone else for that matter have any idea what this is. Plant fossil maybe? I found it in a discard pile of a sand pit. It's about 2 1/2 inches long and 1/2 in. dia. at it's largest. There's a round ball/socket on the bottom that appears like it was attached to a stem or something with.
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Was the sandpit close to the ocean? That looks exactly like a spine from a red slate pencil urchin (like I knew that before I looked it up!
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). My mom has a wind chime she got in Hawaii that has lots of these hanging from it. Click the link for a picture. link

Tomo
 
Tomo, that sure looks like it for sure. The question now is what was it doing in a rock pile in central Nebraska?
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Shovelbuck - My first guess would be a belemnoid - which look about like petrified cigars. They're actually thought to be an internal balast in the tail of an extinct squid. Sort of like the hard parts of modern cuttlefish (the kind pet birds chew on). But... belemnoids were most common during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. So if you found it in Pleistocene river deposits with mammoth and bison bones it's got to be something else. Without being able to pick it up, I'd guess maybe a bone fragment that was polished in the river for a few hundred years or an oddly weathered piece of sandstone or petrified wood.
You probably don't want to try this, but one way to find out more about it would be to break off one end of it to get a look at an unweathered surface. Then you'd have a better idea if it was bone, rock or plant remains.
Got any other cool finds over in Nebraska?
 
Greywolf,There's a place I go every so often about 2 hrs. south east of here that has literally tons of deposits that are loaded with clam type fossils. You actually can stop and pick them up in the middle of the county road! Anywhere from small hand size peices to 200lb. chunks. An authority from UNL told me they are about 300 million years old. Remains from an ancient ocean. My favorite place in Ne. is Ashfall fossil beds. Allthough you can't collect stuff there it's very interesting. Hundreds of prehistoric rhinos, horses,camels, etc. It's up by the South Dakota border near the town of Royal. An excellant book covering all of Nebraskas fossil history is "The Cellars Of Time" It is published by Nebraskaland magizine. Thanks for your reply and if you are ever out this way give me a call and we can look for some bones. Jay
 
Shuvelbuck,
Looks like Tomo and Greywolf have you in good hands. I also looked up the red slate pencil urchin and that certainly does look alot like it. This may have traveled thier via stream, river or Glacier. It's hard to tell but from the picture it looks very smooth which means it has probably spent some time in flowing water at one time or another. Cool, keep digging.
 
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