One Of My Favorite Finds Ever

[jasong]

When prospecting, I try to keep an eye on everything around me. In this case I thought I was in formation about 95 million years old. With the K-T boundary above me, I was keeping a close eye on the rocks around me for dino fossils. I've found a lot of invertebrates before - clams, bacculites, ammonites, etc. I've found leaves, fish, and small mammal (mice) bones in younger formations, but never a dino bone before.

Finally found my first one in the wild!

It's well embedded in the rock. It's a sandstone/conglomerate, probably representing an old river delta or braided channels. So unfortunately this bone was a 1-off. A dinosaur died and the bones probably got spread asunder in an ancient river. I looked everywhere for the missing pieces, but this was it. 

You can really see the bone structure close up. I took the photos to a paleontologist at a local museum and he said he thought it was likely some part of the hip structure. He gave me some latin name for the exact bone but it went in one ear and out the other. 

It's just the end joint part, the rest of the leg or whatever it was has broken off. So unfortunately he said it wasn't of scientific interest to them since it was just a 1-off, and broken.

But still, I've been wandering the hills since I was a child and in 3 decades I've never found a real vertabrate dinosaur bone. Pretty dang cool in my book, and one of my favorite finds ever!

Was a long field trip, doing some exploration. Got some nuggets too. Nothing impressive, but almost paid for gas anyways. Popped these out with the 15" CC X Coil. I love being the first coil on a site, it's so much easier to really understand a patch and area seeing where each and every nugget came from. Well actually, not the first coil, the first coil was the 11" on the 6000, I discovered this spot with the 6000 and then brought the big gun in to have a look at what laid deeper. 

On that size/type gold I'm getting 2x the depth with the GPZ/15cc. Easy. Maybe more. 

 

[phrunt]

Congratulations on the Dinosaur bone, that's so awesomely cool!  Some nice nuggets there too but without a doubt the bone is the find of the trip!

[jasong]

Thanks, I'm still pretty pumped about it. I was just thinking last year about making a video series about what would happen if a gold prospector took up the challenge of trying to find dino skeletons using some of the same research/field work techniques as in gold prospecting/exploration. Never did try to film that, but pretty excited I managed to find a dino bone anyways, it's been a life long goal.

Never know what you might find out there, I love exploring!

[rvpopeye]

 Great surface find !   !Too bad you couldn't bring it home. 👍

 

[GotAU?]

 Nice find! Is the bone in limestone or volcanic ash? Can’t tell from photo.

My wife and I also love to go exploring and rockhounding too, and it usually takes us to places that geologically speaking, aren’t known for gold but I still try swinging while there.  We could never live somewhere else for the open spaces we have in the western states!

[jasong]

18 minutes ago, GotAU? said:

 Nice find! Is the bone in limestone?

My wife and I also love to go exploring and rockhounding too, and it usually takes us to places that geologically speaking, aren’t known for gold but I still try swinging while there.  We could never live somewhere else for the open spaces we have in the western states!

This bone is in a sand/conglomerate member of a much larger sandstone/mudstone/shale noted for both oil and and fossils. I'm staying semi vague intentionally because I'm the only one detecting out here and this is...well, a public forum.  The area lacks any real modern geologic mapping so I'm not 100% certain, but I think I'm in the ballpark with formation ID. Intense amounts of faulting and folding have made it hard to really map things out though.

I hear that though! I love living out here so much, my life is in wandering the hills and mountains searching for things. 

BTW, this place has no written history of gold production, and almost no old timer workings either, at least not nearby. You would never believe there is gold here unless you saw it come out of the ground. I'm 90% sure it's coming from an ancient paleo-river that itself was fossilized into rock and in areas has re-eroded back out and gotten re-concentrated locally in some areas. 

[GotAU?]

4 minutes ago, jasong said:

This bone is in a sand/conglomerate member of a much larger sandstone/mudstone noted for both oil and and fossils. I'm staying semi vague intentionally because I'm the only one detecting out here and this is...well, a public forum.  The area lacks any real modern geologic mapping so I'm not 100% certain, but I think I'm in the ballpark with formation ID. Intense amounts of faulting and folding have made it hard to really map things out though.

I hear that though! I love living out here so much, my life is in wandering the hills and mountains searching for things. 

BTW, this place has no written history of gold production, and almost no old timer workings either, at least not nearby. You would never believe there is gold here unless you saw it come out of the ground. I'm 90% sure it's coming from an ancient paleo-river that itself was fossilized into rock and in areas has re-eroded back out and gotten re-concentrated locally in some areas. 

Cool find, nice indicators for stream deposits too- water tumbled fossilized bone embedded in sandstone, and nearby you found a cool little placer deposit. Very nice discovery!

[GotAU?]

You’re also proving my point to my wife that bringing my detector on our hikes might be worth it! 😁

[beatup]

Well done , congrats on the fossil find very hard to come by unless you can get on land in the bighorn basin some good hunting on private land there .

[jasong]

5 minutes ago, GotAU? said:

You’re also proving my point to my wife that bringing my detector on our hikes might be worth it! 😁

For sure, never know till you check!

In my case usually what I'm doing first is driving huge areas with the ATV, just looking at the ground for gravels. I take a bunch of ziplock baggies of sample dirt with GPS coords, pan them later at home. Then come back out with the 6000 and cover about a square mile of land around every sample site that had fine gold in the sample pans.

Kinda narrows down the amount of land I have to walk over. I'm sure I'm missing some nugget patches that just didn't have any fine gold in them though too - not uncommon in Arizona to find that for instance.