A friend of mine has found a large fossil ammonite. It’s aprox 16" across and appears to be in limestone. It’s intact and seems in pretty good condition. Any ideas about where he can get it valued/authenticated? Any rough ideas about it’s value? I doesn’t really want to sell it, but if it’s worth a lot he says he would be tempted.
Browsing around the googles, it appears that there are lots of places that will sell you large “museum-quality” ammonites for a few hundred dollars. Of course, those have been professionally prepared, and are in unusually good condition. So that’s an extreme upper bound.
If it’s really 16" it’s way bigger than most (but not all) available on ebay, but a lot of those have been prepped for display.
Yeah, it looks like a really good one. Doesn’t need any restoration, maybe just polishing up. Doing a bit more research, it looks like the value is more dependant on the rarity of similar fossils, species etc. It’s more about getting it certified. We don’t really know it’s not a fake. It looks a bit too perfect to me, and it was just found in the garden of a property they had taken over (admittedly in an area where ammonites are very common.), it could easily be the work of a talented sculptor though. Even if it has no monetary value, we’d still like to know if it’s 10 years old or 100 million.
Per ebay large ammonites appear to be (literally) as common as dirt. I’m not sure why anyone would make the substantial effort to copy of one when the real thing is relatively cheap.
I guess so. It’s pretty nice as a decorative item though, someone may have made it with no deception in mind. The couple of hours I’ve spent reasearching it online suggests that fake fossils are very common and caution is strongly advised when purchasing over the interweb. Some are very expensive and like I say, it’s down to the rarity of similar examples. Like anything, the value is just what someone is willing to pay. I, knowing nothing about fossils could see 2 which I judged to be very similar (same size, equivalent condition etc) and one could be worth £50, the other several hundred pounds.
It wouldn’t have to be a substantial effort, though. You could just make a mold from a real fossil and then start cranking out cement casts at the local hardware store for $20 a pop or however much mass-produced lawn sculpture goes for. Though I’m not aware of anyone actually doing that (although it’d be a lot cooler than a stupid yard gnome, IMHO), so no reason to think this one isn’t authentic.
Can you post some pictures of it Mikeisskeptical? Just because it’s probably not valuable doesn’t mean it’s not cool!
I’ll ask my friend although I don’t see him that often these days, so he’d have to email me some. And yeah, it is pretty cool, I’m green with envy.
Hmmm. Manufactured ornamental garden sculpture?
Absolutely, not discounting that possibility. I have no idea how to go about testing it though. (It looks like limestone as opposed to concrete and it seems realistic.) The area where it was found has lots of fossil shops, it’s famous for it’s ammonites, so maybe as a first step he should take it round a few of those and see if there’s a consensus. Thanks for the input everyone.
Instead of fake manufactured ornamental garden sculpture, maybe it’s a real, purchased ornamental garden sculpture, from one of the local fossil shops. That would explain why it’s “too perfect”.
Again, a possibility.