Aurora Parotodus benedeni Shark Tooth

It was a little later in the collecting day at the Lee Creek mine and more people had made their way into the old mounds, but still the collecting was amazing. I came to a wall of Yorktown that someone had already walked both top and bottom. I bent down to get a closer look at some particularly nice Yorktown and I saw another big mako! In my excitement, I had stopped taking ground photos of makos for a while because I had found so many, but I could tell this particular mako was very large so I took the time to snap a photo. I put my camera away and dug my finger into the soft Yorktown formation to extract this mako. The sediment easily gave way and I popped the tooth out from underneath. To my amazement, the tooth I thought was a big mako was in fact an Aurora Parotodus benedeni, one of the most prized of all fossil shark teeth found at Lee Creek in the Yorktown formation. I have seen many of my Black River Fossil brethren score them in the past, but I had not found a complete one before this trip.