Image: Nobu Tamura
Sadly if you're going to find fossils on your own you’re not going to find the most extravagant or uncommon fossils from the start. Many people develop their fossil collection by purchasing fossils. But with everything, there are risks that you have to take.
It is extremely important and necessary that you are given the correct location of where the fossil was found. If this information is not given, the fossils value is much less.
How to spot fake fossils
Look out for “bad” looking fossils, the quality matters, or look out for them in bulk lot as many of these will be fakes. But some of these people, who make them, spend a lot of time over them, making them look almost exactly like the real ones. If the fossil looks good, the easier the fraud is as they will be more expensive. This can be a problem when looking out for these fakes. Wherever you see a good place with lots of museum quality fossils for sale, fakes are very likely to occur.
You should also be more familiar with the real thing than the guy who's making them.
•If you ever buy fossils on the internet, always check the seller’s feedback. Only buy off the seller if they have positive feedback.
•If many fossils (e.g. trilobites) are on one piece of rock they could have been assembled or completely fake. Also look to see if the different creatures lived together, as in some cases they don’t, and are totally fakes.
•If the fossils on offer all look very similar, they are very likely to be fakes.
•On eBay, never trust the seller if the image is out of focus. Sometimes the seller will deliberately blur the photo to block you from identifying that it is a fake.
Fake Fossils part .1
In Affiliation With
Pseudofossils
Pseudofossils are rocks which have a strange shape or pattern on them. They are not fossils, but rocks which have suffered weathering, or had a mineral seeping into them. Or they might have even been formed that way.
The sad thing is, many people sell pseudofossils as real fossils.
To find out whether the rock is a fossil or a pseudofossil or not, you have to learn about the age of the rock and where it was found. Or it can sometimes be easier to show the specimen to a palaeontologist.
On the spot, you can also use this method to distinguish whether a fossil is fake or not. Think carefully, which parts of the plant or animal are typically preserved? Usually, the hardest parts like bone or teeth are preserved. The soft tissue is rarely preserved. Eggs are very rare because the shells are thin, apart from dinosaur eggs, with its shell over half a centimetre thick usually.
Casts
Fossil casts are made all the time all over the world. Some people sell them as casts, but others sell them as the genuine thing sadly.
Luckily, these fake fossils are normally easy to identify.
Not only do you normally see them in bulk (lots of the same), but they normally have less detail, apart from if they are made as a cast from silicone. Silicone allows them to be identical to the original fossil. This is hard to identify, but it is quite easy to recognize as the specimen will normally be casted of a perfect specimen, which is rare to find.
When they are painted, they normally have paint streaks on them, which are easy to identify, or they will all be painted with the same colour, which is spottable as fossils from the same area will all have slightly different colour tones normally.
Plaster of Paris usually leaves air bubbles all over the specimen, which can be so big you can see them a mile away. Some dealers try to cover these up, but by doing that, they will colour the top of the rock, so never buy a specimen with a different colour on the top than on the bottom.
Fake Amber
Amber is fossilised resin (or gum) from some types of plants from prehistoric forests. The earliest known piece of Amber comes from the carboniferous period, when large dragonflies roamed the skies. The best ambers come from the Baltic and the Dominican Republic.
It is formed when the resin from trees get buried in the soil, and after millions of years of a process which involves oxidation and polymerization. It hardens and looks like a gem, but it is an organic substance, so it is not a mineral.
When it drips down a tree trunk, it can trap debris such as leafs, seeds, feathers, insects or even small reptiles and amphibians!
Amber has been used by mankind for thousands of years, even before the ice age. It was used as beads and is still used as beads and jewellery today.
What is copal?
Copal, otherwise known as young amber is not fossilised. It is a younger form of tree resin. Sadly, many auctions offer copal but is said to be amber, and is sold for the price of amber, which is much more valuable. There is a difference in them, so it can be identified. It is mainly found in New Zealand, Japan, the Dominican Republic, Columbia and Madagascar. Columbian and Madagascan copal is usually not older than 200 years. Madagascan copal is found 1 or 2 meters below living copal trees from roots of trees that may have lived thousands of years earlier.
There are a number of practical tests that can be carried out on amber to check to see if it is not hoaxed.
When checking to see if the specimen you should test at minimum 3 of the methods explained below. If the specimen fails a single one of the tests, it could mean the piece is not real amber, but copal or a plastic.
HARDNESS
Amber has hardness on the hardness scale is normally in the region of 2 - 3. With suitable scratch sticks it should be simple enough to test the sample. You can even use a fingernail to scratch the sample.
TASTE
A simple non-destructive test that you can do yourself is to clean and taste the specimen. Carefully wash it with soap and water, then with just water. This should leave a clean specimen ready for this test. Lick the specimen several times, allowing the delicate taste to linger in your mouth. It should be extremely delicate. Real amber has almost no taste to it at all.
CARVING
Gat a fairly shark knife and try to carve off a small piece of the amber from a more insignificant section, e.g. on the bottom or where there are no insulations visible. Real amber breaks up and chips, while plastic and copal can be cut and small bits can be removed without any part fracturing.
UV LIGHT
Copal put under a UV light will show hardly any change in colour. Amber will look a sallow shade of blue.
A HOT NEEDLE
Get a needle and put it in a flame until it glows red, and then drive the point into the sample to test it. If it is copal, the hot needle will melt the copal fairly quickly and it leaves a light aromatic scent. They melt copal in some churches, so you might have smelt it there before. When you test amber it does not melt half as quickly as the copal and sooty fumes come off the specimen.
FRICTION
You should stroke the piece forcefully on a cloth. Authentic amber should leave a faint resin like aroma while copal may start to weaken and the cloth could become a little bit sticky. Amber can also become charged with static electricity and can pick up small pieces of newspaper ripped up.
Writen by Kosmos
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