Gorgeous 1.33 Inch Nanotyrannus Tooth

This is an beautiful 1.33" long Nanotyrannus lancensis tooth from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. It has superb enamel preservation, fine serrations and just a single crack repair with no restoration. Really a nice quality, tyrannosaurid tooth.

There is still much debate in the paleontological community about whether Nanotyrannus and Tyrannosaurus rex are really the same species, with Nanotyrannus representing juveniles. Hopefully new finds will come to light and settle this debate but given the fact isolated Tyrannosaurid teeth are notoriously hard to identify down to the species level, it's unlikely their teeth could be told apart accurately anyways.

This tooth was found at a private ranch in Butte County, South Dakota earlier this summer. It comes from a quarry known as the "Tooth Draw Quarry" that has produced many high quality dinosaur teeth over the past several decades. In the Late Cretaceous some 65 million years ago, this quarry was located in a sub-tropical floodplain that would have been similar to modern day coastal Louisiana. It consists of 2 meters of alternating sandstone and gravel, representing a river channel lag deposit. It contains many isolated dinosaur teeth including T-Rex, Nanotyrannus, Raptors and Triceratops, but teeth of this high quality are rare finds.