2.6" Robust Tyrannosaur Tooth - Judith River Formation

Robust Tyrannosaur Tooth - Judith River Formation #207663

This is a robust 2.6" long Tyrannosaur tooth collected this past summer from the Judith River Formation of Montana. This formation is approximately 70 million years old, or about 5 million years older than the Hell Creek Formation which produces T-Rex.

This large tooth is incredible, with nice enamel preservation and some faint serration preservation in spots along both edges. There is some compression of the tooth that required some surface touch-up restoration where the enamel chipped away. There are some fractures that run across the tooth near the middle and the basal end, each of which required some minor gap fill restoration. The remaining restoration can be found along the distal edge at the basal end and along the mesial edge where a small chip of tooth was glued back into place.

Three species of tyrannosaur have been described from the Two Medicine & Judith River Formations: Albertosaurus, Gorgosaurus and Daspletosaurus. Research done on teeth from these three tyrannosaurs has concluded that isolated teeth are statistically impossible to assign to a specific genus because they are so similar.

Morphometry of the teeth of western North American tyrannosaurids and its applicability to quantitative classification

The Judith River Formation is one of the world's most prolific sources of Late Cretaceous vertebrate fossils. At least sixteen Orders containing more than forty Genera are known from the formation. These include fish, amphibians, mammals, and insects in addition to reptiles and avian (birds) and non-avian dinosaurs. Among the more interesting specimens is Leonardo, a mummified and fossilized Brachylophosaurus. This is a hadrosaur, a duck-billed dinosaur found with amazing soft-tissue preservation: skin impressions can be found on 90 percent of its body! The pattern in the skin on its feet is even preserved. In addition to Leonardo, the Judith River Formation contains the remains of the theropod Hesperornis, the only known freshwater Hespernorthid, a penguin-like bird.

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