So I’ve been into fossils for awhile now and finally tracked down a wonderful Keichousaurus for my collection. This guy makes me really happy. Sharing what I posted to Facebook…
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New addition to my fossil collection, a really well prepared example of Keichousaurus Hui, a small marine reptile (dinosaur) that lived in China.
Keichousaurus are around 240 million years old and went extinct at the end of the Triassic. This little guy would have been about a foot in length uncurled. If you look closely you can see his little needle like teeth and even what appears to be the remains of his last meal (maybe a small fish?) in his belly.
I know I’m not supposed to feed my collection habits for awhile, but Alice (my wife, some of you may remember her on the forums as ‘spottedbanana’ who used to annodize with me) agreed he is cute.
That’s really cool, my wife’s family has a house near Aurora NC. They mine phosphate over there and they pull lots of fossils and they will let you dig through their discard piles. LOADS of dolphin teeth, shark teeth (including Megalodon) that’s the huge downfall of sea based recovery. Usually it’s only teeth and shells that survive. But that it’s VERY handsome.
Super cool! Hard to beat the feeling of finding a fossil or cool mineral! It’s like landing a hard trick that first time or something. Here is a small portion of my Fossil and Mineral collection! These larger pieces sit in front of a tiny house I built last year and use as an office. Most of these fossils were found during stream restorations in TX!
That is so cool! I’ve collected MANY invertebrate fossils while on my usual rockhounding expeditions but never a vertebrate. Of course I normally go rockhounding on public land so I can’t collect vertebrate fossils anyways. But it would be nice to be the one to call it in.
“Order No. 11 of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress effective as of November 19, 19822. Article 2 states in Part”…Fossils of paleovertebrates and paleoanthropoids of scientific value shall be protected by the state in the same way as cultural relics."
Keichousaurus Hui is a very common fossil in China, in fact, it’s one of the most common vertebrate fossils regularly found in China. (You can literally find roughly prepped fossils for the price of a titanium throw.) These fossils have been well studied and I believe hold little new scientific value, but since the laws do not define ‘scientific value’, I suppose this could always be debated.
No T.Rex, but I do have a Triceratops vertabra! I believe it’s from North Dakota or something like that… I need to find the papers. Note the clean spinal column hole.