This is a stone I found 1978 in Egypt. More exactly near Abu Zenima in the Sinai peninsula, something like 200 km south of Suez. It looks like limestone, but a geologist friend of mine is not sure if it really is. The height of the stone is about 14cm.

Bigger picture (125 kB) (I know the picture is not 100% sharp, a better one comes some day. And with a scale.)

I didn't know what it is. Some people suggested that it could be a fossil, perhaps a print from a part of a Sigillaria palm tree. Another said it must be man-mande, perhaps a casting mold ("the chisel marks are visible"). OK,but who made it and threw it away in the desert?

And then I made the previous version of this page, wrote about it to a newsgroup and got an identification!  Jim Craig wrote in sci.bio.paleontology:

What you have is a fabulous fossil of the lower dentition (tooth plate) of the eagle ray, Myliobatis.

It looks to be as near as complete as I've seen and is beautifully preserved. The teeth are arranged in an upper and lower plate (you have the lower), each with seven files (yours looks complete).

Yours is a view of the roots of the tooth plate. If you could expose the other side the surface of the dentition would be smooth.

In the eagle ray (which is a member of the class of fish Chondrichthyes - making it a close relative to the sharks) the mouth is set on the underside of the fish. It inhabits warm, shallow marine environments living on crustaceans (prawns, crabs and lobsters), molluscs (shells) and small fish.

I would hazard a guess that this is probably Eocene in age (making it around 50 million years old). As for the species I'm not sure but there is a fish in the lower Eocene here in the UK that looks identical. It's name is Myliobatis toliapicus and is found on in the London Clay. The species name "toliapicus" comes from the old Roman name "Toliapis" given for the Isle of Sheppey; hence "toliapicus" of the Isle of Sheppey.

A bit about the site:

Bigger picture (101 kB)

Here is a picture of my friend driving a jeep roughly at the spot where I found the stone near Abu Zenima in the Sinai peninsula, about 200 km south of Suez. No, there is no road, we were just driving aroud for fun when I found the rock. If I remember it right, it was during the winter, after some rain. The fossil  was lyingt here on the ground, face up. I saw it from the Jeep and just picked it up. This was during the UNEF II mandate of the United Nations peacekeeping mission on the border between Egypt and Israel. But that's a different story...

And here's a bit more about Sinai: http://www.geographia.com/egypt/sinai/index.html
A better map, shows location of Abu Zenima. 

Mail me

26.11.2001