claws and teeth are really rare. claws don't tend to fossilize well...they're like fingernails. Teeth are just so small they tend to get washed away or simply overlooked. I found three of them on my last dig and the paleontologist told me that he hadn't found that many in the last year. I guess I have a good eye for detail or something. He didn't let me keep the teeth. He says those belong in a museum, and he's right. I also found a garfish tooth, and a few garfish scales, again, which belong in a museum, so I couldn't keep em. Those were really cool tho...the fish tooth was still sharp after millions of years.
claws and teeth are typically found in areas called "lag deposits" which is basically a bend in a dried up riverbed or floodplain where junk washed out by river or flooding collects. you get a lot of miscellaneous bone fragments there too, mostly just sitting right on top of the ground because of a recent flash flood. Unless you really know your dinos, its really hard to guess which dino the fragment came from, and even then, its still just an educated guess from knowing which dinos are in the area, and what the bones look like... for example, a T-Rex bone is a lot more dense and weighs a lot more than a duckbill bone, because T-Rexes were a lot heavier and had a lot more muscle to support, so if you find a really dense, heavy bone, you can make an educated guess that it came from a T-Rex, and if you find a lighter bone, it probably came from a triceratops, because they're the most common in the area, but it could just as easily be from a duckbill. About one in a hundred skellys out there are duckbills. One in a million is a T-Rex. They're much rarer because they're at the top of the food chain. Duckbill and Triceratops are at the bottom, because they eat plants. It takes a lot of plants to feed a triceratops, and it takes a lot of triceratops to feed one T-Rex. Sue, the T-Rex skelly that was sold at Christies auction was found about ten miles from our dig site. Sue is the most complete T-Rex skeleton ever found, and she sold for millions. Stan, the other T-Rex found by the same paleontologist as Sue, was also found nearby. T-Rex skellys are definitely in the area...I just haven't found one....yet.
