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Re: Any one up for fossil ID, again



At 07.43 22/01/02 -0700, you wrote:
they are carved rocks, intended to fool tourists into thinking they are
dinosaur fossils

> I know next to nothing about fossil identification, but I was going to say
> that they at least superficially resemble sauropod unguals of some sort.

I showed it also to a pedologist and he agreeds with me that they look like stones, not like bones :-)
As David Marjanovic wrote before, some features (rounded structures at the "base" with a different colour/texture) make the thing look like a conglomerate.
IMHO either David Marjanovic hypothesis is correct and they are very poorly preserved internal moulds of some invertebrate shell, or (as I suggested in my previous posting) their shape is solely a product of some geomorphological agent (water). We may also combine the two hypotheses: a poor internal mould that suffered an heavy action of the geomorphological agent.
All the best,


                                        Silvio Renesto



_
"The Wise Man is like a bamboo tree;
                simple, upright, and useful, but hollow inside"

                                                Lao Tzu

Silvio Renesto

Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra
Università degli Studi di Milano
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