And your qualifications to judge are…?
Placed against my actual geology and archaeology degrees, that is?
I presume this means you’re never going to dispute anything I post on biology then?
This is about the “Bird Guy” dig, isn’t it :D?
You know I wouldn’t dispute anything you said without a good basis (which includes two undergrad years of bio subjects).
I’m not claiming to be the ultimate Dope authority on geology or PNW stone tools, far from it. There are others here who are probably much more expert in both than me.
I’m just saying I 'm far from a layman in rocks and archaeology, and I was wondering if msmith537 had a basis for argument. It doesn’t seem they do, beyond “seeing lots of rocks around…and whatnot”
“pebbly beach” is probably about it. Transported by glacier, rounded by waves, selected by someone for roundness out of all the stones on the beach and then discarded near a path in the woods when they got bored. Or it could be aliens. Anyway, it does give new meaning to the phrase “You don’t know where it’s been.”
Agree with others that the mineral appears to be granite.
Here is a different way it might have become round and polished:
Gastrolyths are stones/sand swallowed by birds that mechanically pulverize food within their gizzard.(AKA craw)
If birds are not dinosaurs, then they are the closest living things, and it turns out that large gastrolyths have been found with some dinosaur fossil remains. At least some dinosaurs had gizzards like modern birds. But big enough to hold actual rocks rather than just sand or gravel like tiny modern birds.
I have a dinosaur gastrolyth somewhere around here. It is slightly larger than a golf ball, light colored stone, nearly white…limestone I’d guess. It was given to me by my friend Peter, who got a half dozen or so from another friend who found around a half-bushel of them while excavating for a driveway slab somewhere in Florida. They are too common for the museum or even the U of F paleontology department to take an interest in.
They are just a little too cool to throw away, but not useful enough to be worth keeping around. So the finder gave a sack full to all his friends, one of whom passed one on to me. For some reason they each have one side that is flattened, and in some cases concave…they are OK for paperweights, if a little small.
If that stone is very round, polished, and especially if one spot is flattened or even concave, it might well be a dinosaur gastrolyth.
No, the museum and the U of F are just tired of having people bringing in every vaguely rounded rock that they find and claiming that it is a gastrolith. You should read this part of the Wiki you linked:
Scientists don’t not want your “gastrolith” because they are so common–they don’t want it because the chance you have one is approximately 0.00000000000274 %.