Fossils are fake

[duncang]

Got your attention, huh?

This is a buyer beware post. For those interested enough to think about buying fossils.

About a year back it was brought up in a meeting at our gem and mineralogical society meeting that some fossils sold on ebay and other venues were cast replicas. I went home and checked out my fossils of about 15 trilobites one was a fake.

There were some pretty good fakes. I have seen since then one keichousaurus fake in person. If you looked closely it has some small bubbles from when it was cast. And the person who owned it had made a scratch to confirm his suspicions.

I had seen a full real keichousaurus fossil at a show. And really thought about getting one. But the cost was way over my budget at the time. I decide to look on line to see if i could get a better price. Knowing that there were fakes made. I started off looking at what the person was selling. Fossils like keichousaurus, trilobites, and some of the mosasaur in matrix had problems.

Most of the keichousaurus are imported from China. I looked at a some dealers and their sale history. I could see that they had previously sold the same "fossil" previously. And spotted the same fossil from other dealers. Sometimes they would show x-rays of what was supposed to be that fossil. But they also used the same x-ray in obviously different fakes.

I also spotted duplicate trilobites.

A lot of the mosasaurs jaws were the actual teeth in a cast made to look like it is a set of partial jaws. Having them attached to a jaw bone increases value by a lot. A few teeth may cost a couple bucks a partial jaw set 30-40 bucks.

BTW here is a museum replica cast keichousaurus from Australia.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Replica-fossil-dinosaur-museum-cast-Keichousaurus-hui-marine-fossil-/250975448595

So just a buyer beware if you ever think wow that would be neat to have.

[pansypoo53219]

1. i do estate sales.

i found several petrified rocks, a rutilated quartz chunk, a tiny citrime crystal covered rock, amethysts. a few skulls, one cow skull. gifted a cow leg bone. all much cheaper. + an old pipestone chunk. all very cheap. lots of classic stuff for e-pal. i see lots of old collections on estatesales.net. its safer i bet.

[duncang]

2. I love the estate sales also.

Best score I didn't know I made till afterward. A picture of the shuttle landing with a lot of autographs. Found out they were all astronauts who had rode a shuttle. 50+ signatures including some of the Challenger shuttle crew.

[frogmarch]

3. A lot of amber

is fake too.

Thanks for posting this information!

[eppur_se_muova]

4. Personally, I avoid buying fossils. It encourages too much destruction.

For-profit fossil hunters will ransack fossil sites to obtain only the most salable items, destroying any "less important" fossils in the process. They also destroy the context in which the fossil was found, which is the source of much valuable scientific information about extinct organisms. Not to mention how much damage is done in "prettying up" fossils for sale -- polishing leaves a hunk of polished rock, which could have come from anything. Why destroy a remnant of life that has endured for maybe hundreds of millions of years to make a pretty rock, when you could just carve a rock (which is actually a common way to make a counterfeit -- see Steven Jay Gould's "The Lying Stones of Marakesh&quot ?

I'm starting to regard fossil dealers (and purchasers) as being not much better than ivory traders.

[duncang]

5. That has been brought up at our gem and mineral meetings

The wholesale ransacking of fossils are a big problem. In the U.S. it happens just not anywhere near what happens over seas. But there are a lot of fossil hunters that aren't out to destroy. We have people from the Houston Museum of Natural science along on our trips. And if there is something they will check and see what and if it should be saved as is. We go every year to a mine. The ore mine through out the year runs heavy equipment through to process material once a year they allow us to come in and hunt for fossils. I've also been to a logging site where heavy equipment was getting ready to come through they allowed us to get petrified wood.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Thumbs up for bringing the museum folks along.

Just wish more people were that conscientious. Unfortunately, this tends to be inversely proportional to $$$ involved. I shudder to think what goes on in China (I know they used to grind up "dragon bones" for their stupid traditional 'medicine') ...

I've read over and over that you shouldn't try to extract a large, delicate, or unusual fossil yourself, but should cover it up and contact the pros. Too many people walk in with a piece of something and then can't find the spot again.

[duncang]

7. Actually most of the time they are leading the trips.

And also they are the persons who id the bones. One of the main things in the U.S. fossils normally are found in places where they have already been disturbed. River beds where bones are randomly jumbled up etc. It's like the fossilized megladon teeth in Fla.. Most are found on the river beds randomly dropped since they lost teeth all through life. And as the post above Fla. has specific laws on permitting for fossil hunting.

On the trips we make looking for bison, early horse, mammoth bones/teeth, clovis points, etc the one thing they do make notes on is the clovis points. (Location and type) Clovis points even though relatively rare are not considered something they have to get for the museum. They did ask if something like a pile where someone had been flint knapping to tell them. They would ask everyone to stop. Since that could mean a encampment. Kind of strange when you first hear that, but that is where context could come in.