Assumptions

Several times in my life I have been confronted with the falseness of one of my assumptions that I had long held to be true. For example, when I was a kid, my parents and several others (fossils dealers) told me that Oreodons were a variety of three toed horse, about the size of a medium size dog. Last year I found out that they were not horses, and have never been considered horses by any serious paleontologist and have since heard that they are just a group of ungulates more closely allied to deer (although people used to think pigs). Well, this weekend another one of my long held assumptions came crumbling down. I had known for a while that a wide variety of fossils come from Morocco and have been able to even identify Moroccan fossils by sight from some distance. Some of the more common items that have grabbed my interest are the very large shark teeth, mosasaur teeth and dinosaurs. All of these are found during phosphate mining. Another fauna found there is of devonian age and consists of a wide variety of trilobites, conodonts, ammonites and nautiloids (orthoceras).
I had heard from some of the other paleo people here at the U of Alberta that palaeophis (a large sea snake) vertebrae were also being found. Naturally, I wanted some (a "snake vert" had once bought as a kid turned out to be from a kangaroo - bought from the same people who told me the lies about oreodons) so I turned to the internet. I found some at Indiana9 fossils for $1.00 each. The label said that they were from the Ouled Abdoun basin, which is in Khouribga, Morocco. It also said that they were of Eocene age. Ok, so I did some checking and it turned out that every one of the shark teeth I have from that region are also of the same age. The mosasaur teeth are however obviously of the late Cretaceous. This means that a lot of labels on my collection in So. Cal. Are quite wrong. Well, I did some further checking and I found several references to that region bearing paleocene rocks. And talking with Caldwell, found out that nobody is really sure whether or not there is a conformable succession or not. I think Caldwell is really hoping that the palaeophis turn out to be Cretaceous (There was apparently a very large palaeophis of Cretaceous age found in Morocco ).
Another assumption that I had was that since I hadn't seen these for sale much that they would be rare and that $1.00 a piece was a good price. Much to my dismay, after I had ordered all 33 at Indiana9 fossils, I found them for only $0.25 each at paleoguy. So I canceled my order from the former, and I think I'll get about 100 from the latter. In the end, I'll actually be paying less for more fossils. Which is always a plus.