A friend of mine recently told me about a fossil he had found here in Southeast Kentucky. He brought the item to my house a couple days later for me to have a look at and take some pictures. This appears to be the fossilized horn of some sort.

It was found near an old strip mine road and the thought was that it may have washed out during a rain storm but that was something unclear.

Here is a close up picture and some more details.


The reason my friend wanted me to look at it was to see if I could possibly identify what it came from. To the left is a close up of the tip of the horn. The was found about 3 months ago and it was laying on the ground and was already broken.

Of course determining the date on this fossilized horn is somewhat difficult. Sometimes it can take things millions of years to fossilize and depending on conditions, it can take as little as a couple of years.

I did some google image searches to see if I could match the fossil up with other animal horns. The closes thing I could come up with was the a Ram's horn.

Now, in my life time we have never had wild rams around here but I wonder if someone owned some rams at some point in this area.

I would think that IF it is a ram's horn and IF it was from an actual wild ram, it would have to be very old.

But now this is just my guess as to what the fossilized horn originally came from.

That was another point of this post, was to see if anyone can make a better identification of the horn. If so, please post in the comments.

In any event, this is a really cool and I'd assume rare find, especially for here in southeast Kentucky. The thing is that our area and forest in general are not very conducive for creating or finding fossils.

I just wanted to share this with everyone today and wanted to see if anyone can give a better identification of the fossilized horn.

Do you think it is a ram's horn? Let us know.

Also, let us know what kind of fossils you have found. Anything really odd?

!!!UPDATE!!!

Thanks to Markus Bühler, we can now identify this fossil. The fossil, that I thought could be a horn, is actually a tree type plant called Giant Horsetail. From my limited research on the subject it appears that at one time the plant grew very large, up to 66 foot tall. But according to what I read, found here, the original plant no longer grows at all, just a smaller version of it.

Here is a picture of fossilized Giant Horsetail

 

Thanks to Markus for the help. Mystery solved!



Thanks
~Thomas~ 


This post by Thomas Marcum, Thomas is the founder/leader of the cryptozoology and paranormal research organization known as The Crypto Crew. Over 20 years experience with research and investigation of unexplained activity, working with video and websites. A trained wild land firefighter and a published photographer, and poet.



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