77008 - Top Quality Red SPINOSAURUS Dinosaur Tooth Cretaceous KemKem Beds

Spectacular example of tooth belonging to an individual of Spinosaurus. The enamel color is spectacular, featuring intense and brilliant orange tones. It has some glued fractures.

One of the difficult features to find in dentition samples of Spinosaurus is present in this piece. It is the preservation of the root (the part of the tooth without enamel, which occupied a lower position in the gum). Its preservation is complicated due to the hollow structure, which can collapse easily when even slight pressures are applied.

The teeth with strong and vivid fossilization colors such as red, orange and black come from small paleochannels composed by thin layers, in the intermediate and upper stratigraphic levels (Red Sandstone Beds), from the Aoufous Formation (Kem Kem Basin, South of Morocco). The lithology of this body of sediment is characterized by the dominance of sandstones (also known as arenites) and fluvial gravel, of siliceous nature. Sometimes large concentrations of iron oxide are present, and then a small sample of that is usually present at the base of the tooth.

These mineralizations are responsible for the wide range of beautiful reddish color tones, slowly drawn during millions of years via fossil-diagenetic processes. The complicated sedimentarian architecture of the layers where most large vertebrates are found makes the excavation methodology a real challenge. Sometimes the local miners have to excavate long tunnels that follow the distribution of the fossiliferous layer.