Opalized scale fossil?

[Kaleb]

Anyone ever come across anything like this? I'm not sure if it's fish, lizard or what but it's neat

[Lindenmeier-Man]

Now that’s unusual , does look like scales of armor of some sort...Going to have to find someone with a more educated opinion than me, but I’d think your correct. I’d of darn sure brought it home !

[painshill]

Those might well be fossil fish scales. Can you give us a more precise location?

[Kaleb]

It came from an area that people frequent looking for fossilized turtle eggs. Salina utah, soldier canyon. Or fish lake national forest

[Benji]

Thats cool find kaleb

[painshill]

It came from an area that people frequent looking for fossilized turtle eggs. Salina utah, soldier canyon. Or fish lake national forest

I was hoping the locality might help narrow it down a bit, but that's too broad to be of real help with either the age of the formation it came from, or the likely species. We just have to leave it at 'indeterminate fish scales', which is actually what we often have to settle for, even when the formation is known. Nice find though.

You may be interested in the link below, which gives the prime fossil locations in Utah, together with the fossil types most frequently found.

http://www.collectingfossils.org/fossils-america/ut/utahfossilsites.htm

[Kaleb]

Jurassic era in arapien shale is what the list said. Not sure if that helps any but if it does that would be great. if not I still appreciate the response and the link.

[painshill]

Hi Kaleb

The members of the Arapien Formation itself are mid-Jurassic, with an age range from 167.7 million years to 166.1 million years. I checked the Palaeobiology Database, which provides taxonomic lists of all reported fossils by location and there are no reported finds of fish fossils in the Arapien. Plenty of bivalves, gastropods and some crinoid and echinoid remains, but not fish or any other vertebrate remains.

That doesn’t mean they don’t exist, but I think it more likely that what you have is Cretaceous rather than Jurassic and has come from one of the overlying or associated strata which date from 145 million years onwards. In central Utah, strata of that age are widely exposed and usually have a distinct ‘fish-scale layer’ within them. The presence of that layer must represent some particular period which relates to an appropriate sea-level environment, since the identifiable fish that are found are deep-water marine teleost (ray-finned) species.

Most commonly, these are now-extinct fish from the order Beryciformes and the family Aleposauridae. Their closest living relatives would probably be lanternfish, so named because they are bio-luminescent (glow in the dark)… not to be confused with anglerfish which actually have a protruding bioluminescent ‘lantern’ rather than an overall bioluminescent skin.

The other (less commonly) reported species is the marine Sphenocephalid teleost fish Xenyllion zonensis. Also extinct, but closely-related to trout-perches and seemingly with a bass-like anatomy.

[Kaleb]

Thank you I really appreciate your willingness to share your knowledge. That's more information than i was ever able to piece together myself.

[2ndoldman]

It has a distinctly serpentine look to it in my opinion.

[Cecilia]

Ohhh, snake skin?

[Kaleb]

Snake skin was the first thing I thought when I found it. What's really weird to me is that it has round, triangular and square scales. That could be normal for all i know but it definitely seems weird.

[painshill]

QUOTE: "Snake skin was the first thing I thought when I found it. What's really weird to me is that it has round, triangular and square scales. That could be normal for all i know but it definitely seems weird."

No, it’s not unusual and in fact it’s one of the things that points towards ‘fish’ rather than ‘snake’ (or reptile).

There are five basic morphologies for fish scales and, although the shapes can to some extent assist in broadly assigning them to particular groups of fish (and to a much lesser extent assigning them to a genus or species), there are pitfalls in using scale morphology alone.

Within each species and even within a single organism, scale morphology varies hugely according to body area, with intermediate forms appearing in different areas. The morphology may not even be uniform within one area of a fish. In part, that can be due to the maturity of the fish and the fact that fish scales do not develop in a single fully-formed layer… they form progressively and are also replaced progressively.

With apologies that this is a link to a copyrighted stock picture, in the top left image you can see multiple layers with different morphologies in the skin of this fish within which (as the caption says) “gradual substitution of the cycloid for the rhombic type may be observed”.

https://tinyurl.com/wz9lstd

[Edit: looks like Alamy doesn't allow hot-linking to individual pictures. Using this link, it should be the 34th picture (which is a B&W sketch, not a photograph) and you can click on it to enlarge]:

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/fo...sh-scales.html



Snake fossils certainly do occur in Utah… in fact Utah has some of the oldest known snake fossils, but the area where you say this was found consists primarily of marine deposits.

One other thing I meant to comment on earlier is your observation that the scales are “opalized”. That’s not impossible, but I think it more likely that you are seeing some vestige of the original scale form’s optical properties. Teleost fish (and I still think that’s what this is) frequently have mirror-like scales that exhibit a silvery or pearly reflectance and I would think you’re seeing the evidence for that in mineral-replaced fossil form.