I am in the process of cataloging my collection and stumbled upon this Morgan dollar. The eagle seems rather strange. Is this tooling perhaps?
Did you look closely at the eagle's neck and breast? Looks like rib bones... does that look off to you?
The inner tail feathers above the branch and arrows also looks weak. Mine was an ANACS 62 yellow label.
At first glance, my thought was it is a fake. The stars and other devices just don't look right to my eye, but if it was worked on and polished, that could be the cause. JMO
I always like to look at the beak, eyes, head & feathers .. but this one I can't really tell due to the angle, focus, lighting and being in a 2x2 flip with the plastic covering it.
This could be attributed to it being in a 2x2. I haven't found my stapler yet, so I had to take the photo in the 2x2.
Looks like the reeding from another Morgan, where it transferred over. Perhaps it took a hard hit from another coin?
It looks more like the grips on a pair of pliers. Not sure why pliers would be applied to a coin, but usually "tooling" means some deliberate attempt to strengthen the details in an area, to make it look better than it was. This just looks like damage, in my opinion.
It appears that there was some attempt to make it look like ribs. It very well could just be damage, but without any significant damage on the obverse, it gave me the impression that someone intentionally did this... for whatever reason. Well, you've already determined that to be "exactly" what happened, so I guess we don't need to discuss any further. Case closed.
The simplest answer is usually the correct one. Occam’s razor. The damage has the appearance of reeding. Dollars were stored in bags, making them prone to contact marks. Many show severe contact marks. The coin in question shows that the thing that caused the damage came from two different angles, and the difference in depth indicates two different levels of force, all consistent with being in an ever-shifting bag of coins. Plus, there is an additional contact mark that crosses the right area of damage, which indicates that it happened after the damage occurred. Sure, go ahead and create an elaborate story where a collector tried to “enhance” his dollar by adding “ribs” that are completely inconsistent with the type. And then it magically returns into circulation where it picks up more significant damage before it gets to where it is now. Or we could just say the coin was beat up in a bag, circulated, then was cleaned and has at best a nominal value over melt. One story seems far more believable to me. Of course, I cannot be right because I am not trying to make a case that this coin is tooled.