Fossils are fake [View all]

[duncang]

Got your attention, huh?

This is a buyer beware post. For those interested enough to think about buying fossils.

About a year back it was brought up in a meeting at our gem and mineralogical society meeting that some fossils sold on ebay and other venues were cast replicas. I went home and checked out my fossils of about 15 trilobites one was a fake.

There were some pretty good fakes. I have seen since then one keichousaurus fake in person. If you looked closely it has some small bubbles from when it was cast. And the person who owned it had made a scratch to confirm his suspicions.

I had seen a full real keichousaurus fossil at a show. And really thought about getting one. But the cost was way over my budget at the time. I decide to look on line to see if i could get a better price. Knowing that there were fakes made. I started off looking at what the person was selling. Fossils like keichousaurus, trilobites, and some of the mosasaur in matrix had problems.

Most of the keichousaurus are imported from China. I looked at a some dealers and their sale history. I could see that they had previously sold the same "fossil" previously. And spotted the same fossil from other dealers. Sometimes they would show x-rays of what was supposed to be that fossil. But they also used the same x-ray in obviously different fakes.

I also spotted duplicate trilobites.

A lot of the mosasaurs jaws were the actual teeth in a cast made to look like it is a set of partial jaws. Having them attached to a jaw bone increases value by a lot. A few teeth may cost a couple bucks a partial jaw set 30-40 bucks.

BTW here is a museum replica cast keichousaurus from Australia.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Replica-fossil-dinosaur-museum-cast-Keichousaurus-hui-marine-fossil-/250975448595

So just a buyer beware if you ever think wow that would be neat to have.