May the Force Be With You!

Tell me these do not look like little Darth Vaders?!

Or a front view of the alien from Alien?

What these fossils come from is an equally alien-looking creature:

I've caught these "searobins" surf-fishing on Cape Canaveral Seashore.  I always hate having to touch those "fingers" when I unhook them.

The waters of the Peace River is are too high for digging so I made my way into one of the nearby creeks, riding on the coattails of fossil friends who had already scouted out the area.  

                                      

We spent a day digging in shallow gravel that held a number of little surprises, including that whole passel of searobin skulls.

Shark teeth were well-represented 

in the sandy gravel where we dug.

Duskies galore!

A smattering of tigers,

sand tigers,

lemons,

and makos, etc. 

But wait!  There's more!

I pulled some hemis and a meg out of there...

as well as a few unusual little shark teeth.

Some mammal fossils...

The top 2 photos are the back and side views of a tapir incisor.  

The bottom 2 photos are a chunk of mammoth tooth showing the chewing surface and a scute from a giant armadillo.

I also found several scutes from normal sized armadillos (i.e. small).

Here's a smorgasbord of small fossils...

I'll go clockwise starting upper left.

Porcupine fish mouth plates, a tilly bone and directly under it a fossilized root/twig, fragments of ray tail spines, drum fish tooth and snake vertebra. Between the fish mouth plates and ray spines are 2 very small dermal denticles from sting rays.  Below the snake vertebra are barracuda teeth, armadillo scutes (middle of photo), garfish scales, and an assortment of alligator teeth.  

Nice!

I'll round the photo gallery out with a photo of middle shell scutes from turtles...

and some other turtle/tortoise fossils.  I especially like the edge of the shell piece.

We all "Indiana Jones" today!

Even Indiana Jones had to start somewhere,

so ignore the neatly clipped lawn and tire swing and

give yourself over to adventure!

I finally got to visit the fabled creek that my fossil club co-members had been digging and flooding FaceBook with photos of their fabulous finds.  I wish I could have gone in the early salad days but my schedule did not permit it.  The creek is small and the discoveries were rapidly dwindling so by the time I drove the 3 hours to get there this weekend, some exploration was needed to find new and fertile fossil grounds.

My team of 3 had planned to walk the creek, probing for gravel the whole way, but recent heavy rains  meant that some areas had us wading through chest-deep black water and fighting strong currents.

I don't like being startled!

Whether it be an alligator bumping into me under water (which has never happened) or a stick floating downstream and hitting me in the back (which has happened a lot),

the resulting screech will be the same.

We went through some desensitization today as the water was full of all kinds of invisible obstacles.

My first find of the day was this old bottle

but after about a mile of slow progress, we hadn't found much in the way of fossils so we decided to climb out of the creek and walk back through the orange groves.  

The only problem was we were on an island of cypress knees with a deep channel of rushing water separating us from the bank.  Joe slogged/swam across with difficulty which made Staci and me a bit nervous so we had him pull us across, one at a time, as we clung to a fossil screen.

Where's the GoPro when you need it?!!!

Here's Staci in a stand of cypress knees in calmer water.

Now, imagine us looking worried, clinging to that screen with the pool noodles attached, while the ferryman pulls us across the channel.  

Yes, we agreed afterward that it was kinda fun. 

We retreated back to the original honey hole

by the tire swings and manicured lawn and managed to wrest a few last treasures from the depleted gravel including this big cow tooth that Staci found.

My weekend wasn't a total bust.

My very first whale tooth!

It has been beaten to hell and back but unless I find a better one, it will stay in my collection.

Puffer fish palate paradise.

Some very pretty shark teeth,

including a tiny tooth in matrix.

Three horse teeth.

Ray mouth plates galore.

I enjoyed the spiral shell casts.

Odds and ends.

(Chewed up deer tine, turtle scutes, tortoise spurs, sea robin nose plate, deer tooth, "Indian beads")

My favorite find was this little tooth.

Just the right amount of adventure for me.

My ".com" Fossil Boom

I love the internet,

even though I'm still not very good at surfing it.

I recently went on a long road trip from Florida to Missouri and used the internet to locate fossil possibilities along the way.  I thought I had everything planned out until I stopped for my midmorning nap in the back seat of my truck outside of Valdosta, GA.  Instead of snoozing, I started surfing only to locate a potential fossil shale site a few hours north of me in Trenton, Ga.  The detour  took me a out an hour out of my way so I skipped the nap and got back on the road.

The first challenge is FINDING the fossil site.

The directions for this site were fairly precise but I still had to stop and ask some locals where the road was.  Then I was supposed to look for an old sign for the Durham Coal Co.  As luck would have it, that sign has now been replaced with this sign:

Doesn't get any more specific than that!

I pulled off the road and got out to see what was what.

A very short walk from the truck was a hillside littered with shale.  It's obvious that a lot of people, probably a lot of students, come here regularly to dig shale chunks out of the old coal mine spoil piles in search of fossils.  

My turn!

The website said I could find plant fossils deposited between the Cambrian and Pennsylvanian periods (504-300 million years ago) and all the shale tumbling down the hillside contained what looked like compressed palm fronds as in the rock in the photo above.

I wanted more variety so I started digging.  I quickly realized I needed to target the tan shale as opposed to the black shale which gave me an impressive peak into that ancient world.

All the shale was exceptionally fragile.  The layers were more folded than flat and didn't want to break cleanly and the rocks were very soft.

I collected a nice stack of rocks and was back on the road in a couple of hours.

When I finally returned home and sorted my fossils, I thought I would just get on the internet and ID a few of these plants.

Why won't the internet hand me the answers I seek on a silver platter?!!!

It really is fascinating to read about how the oxygen levels were so different in the Paleozoic and how it helped shape which plants and animals evolved during that time.  A whole catalogue of plants that are now extinct.  Lots of ferns, primitive trees, and rushes but too many for me to easily ID any of my little fossils.  

That's ok.

I'll just enjoy them as they are and continue to keep stuffing info into my brain until something clicks.

At least I didn't run into an internet site proclaiming the plants were brought here by aliens, although I'm sure such a site exists.