Taking advantage of a holiday

Monday was Presidents' Day

which doesn't actually affect my fossil schedule

since I have Mondays off, but after a weekend of visiting with friends in south Florida and volunteering at the Fossil Club of Lee County's Fossil Fest, 

I needed some shovel time!

So I'll start with the best news...

I found me a saber cat carnassial!!!

It's a broken saber cat carnassial, but a big cat tooth all the same.

Look at it...

Look at it some more...

Mesmerizing, isn't it?

Here's a drawing. 350 to 600 lbs.  Yikes!

I also found another plateful of glyptodont scutes as well as 2 perfect giant armadillo scutes

and 2 regular size armadillo scutes and one shabby gator scute.

It's not a lucrative spot but it produces some great fossils.

A very nice 3-toed horse tooth:

Bison:

Gator teeth and vertebra (with a couple of other verts thrown in:

A HUGE garfish scale:

A modern chunk of cow jaw:

More pretty turtle material:

And lots of odds and ends:

Let's see...lots of small shark teeth including a couple of nice hemis, horse teeth, ray mouth plates and dermal denticles, a toe bone, etc.

So here's the part where I'll ramble on a bit to try and get more actual words into my blog

instead of just fabulous photos.

Maybe a couple more photos:

Here's Tom with our coral table at the Fossil Club of Lee County's Fossil Fest.

It was his first time being a vendor and he enjoyed the process.  I've tried being a vendor of different things over the years and I'm not good at it.  I don't have the patience to answer the same questions over and over again.  I would excel as a coral merchandiser, just refilling coral bins and not talking to anyone which is probably why I do better with the eBay side of things. 

I manned the silent auction table for the club.

That's me on the left.  The photographer snuck up on us for the first shot so of course I protested and demanded and re-do.  You gotta give us time to get our faces right.

The silent auction is a good format for me.  It's fast and furious and there's no time to explain things.  15 minutes per lot.  You want it?!  Bid on it!!

It's a good little fossil fest, held for the second year in a row at The Shell Factory in Ft. Myers, Florida, and hopefully we'll grow it in the future.

We have some fossil hunting planned this weekend but it's raining at the moment.

Which I hate!

But unless there is a freak hurricane, we'll find somewhere to dig.