Arrowhead/ fossil pendant?

[Steg2020]

I found this on the very top of the beach at my home in Washington County, R.I. Double sided fossil, smoothed by being tumbled in Narragansett bay....but it looks as if someone specifically shaped it. Any thoughts would be great!!

[Tam]

That’s a wonderful find . Charlie will tell you exactly what it is . He is from there .

[CMD]

Welcome. I like it. I've collected fossils for many years here. Artifact hunting took over the last few decades, but always fun to fossil hunt. It's either a fern, or seed feed, the latter being extinct ferns, but I can't tell the genus. Might be two different types, impossible for me to say. The appearance the water tumbling produces is cool, and the color contrast between fossil and rock is nice. I don't think it was shaped, however. Just based on the two photos. Just a chunk of shale that got smoothed down to a beach pebble over time. IMHO. You find them that way, now and then. We used to walk very rocky beaches, looking for the shale cobbles, cracking them open, and hope for the best. Cool find.

It's Pennsylvanian Period, also known as the Upper Carboniferous. RI, the deposits underlying the Narragansett Basin, of RI and Ma, extending toward Boston. This region was a tropical swamp, with lush vegetation. The age is roughly 300 million. The sedementary deposits from that age comprise the Rhode Island Formation, shales, sandstones, conglomerates. Nice find.

This is what it looked like in the Narragansett Basin, and elsewhere in eastern North America during the Upper Carboniferous.

[Cecilia]

Love bottom pic!

[Steg2020]

Thank you so much!! I absolutely love it, by far my most cherished find. We always walk the beach looking for "treasures" and this is the very definition of what we look for! I have found only 1 other arrowhead, I will post a picture of it. It was also a beach find, tumbled by the bay.

[Hoss]

Awesome find , good eye.

[Benji]

Cool find steg

[painshill]

Good eye to spot that. Charlie has given you great information and pictures.

Mostly we assign these fossil plant leaf and frond fragments to “Pecopteris”. It’s what is known as a “form genus”. That means we have invented it as a category int which we lump probably several hundred plants whose true identity cannot be positively determined from the fossil remains we find.


Effectively we’re just classifying them by shape and appearance even though they may only be loosely related to one another botanically. We know they’re from a mixture of fern types, including seed ferns and tree ferns, from low-growing ones up to those with heights of about 30 feet. Many of them have been identified as probable representative of the extinct tree fern genus Psaronius.

[Steg2020]

Thank you!! It's so nice to get feedback and to actually understand exactly what I'm looking at!