I need help with a Large Canine Tooth

[Hoss]

I have a friend on Facebook named Paul Davis he lives here in East TN and he found this tooth in a corn field while looking for arrowheads.
Paul has a cool page on Facebook  called Tennessee Artifacts -and- History
Anyway I thought you guys might be able to help so Paul asked me to try it on our pages.

[CliffJ]

Hoss, It could be a root section from a canine tooth on a cougar or mountain lion, or older.

[truceburner]

Can you show us a picture of the occlusal (chewing) surface of the item?

[Hoss]

I will see if I can get him to take more pictures thanks

[painshill]

I've been keeping my powder dry on this one. I'm not completely convinced it's a tooth. I suspect it might be a shell. I'm troubled by the way it has broken... it looks more like a crushing fracture with some dislocation of the surface material which would be very unusual for a tooth. Even for a pathological tooth. The striations are also unusually deep for a tooth.
In terms of better views, it's not really the occlusal (if it were a tooth) we want to see... it's what would be the the root end (the fat end) where I would hope to see a pulp cavity or get a better handle on differentiation between dentine and enamel (if present).