Wild Fun at the Fossil Fest!!!

So I always overstate a bit in my titles

 to try and stir up interest.

I worked the Fossil Club of Lee County's silent auction table for the 3rd year in a row

and the only wildness was me scrawling prices on bid sheets and digging through boxes of donations.

I had already vowed to Tom that I was going to relax this year and let Shirley handle the bulk of the operation but as soon as I got there, the control freak within shifted into high gear.

Shirley was so relaxed, it took me awhile to whip her into a similar frenzy.

We had another helper, an older gentleman, who kept watch over smaller items on the bid table.  As the end of the day drew nigh, I announced to him that I was going to add a shot of gin to my ginger ale.  He looked at me blankly which had me worried that he was a man who would never mix alcohol and fossils but then he flatly stated that he preferred a dirty martini.

Cheers!

All in all, it was a success and made a decent contribution to our club.

I came away with a cool new SPF protective shirt.

As I pulled it out of a donation box, a potential bidder asked what size it was, to which I immediately replied,  "My size," and stuffed it back in the box. 

 I made a monetary donation to the club and claimed it as mine.

I usually avoid sun shirts that are white or mostly white as I've learned that spending hours digging in mud while I stand in murky water imparts a tinge that even Tide can't combat but I couldn't resist the shark tooth motif.

Pam, Vickie and I slowed down long enough for a photo opp.

Cute!

Here's a member of our club showing off some of the great crafts for sale:

After the festival ended, 

I headed to Miss Vickie's house in Arcadia to spend the night.

We had hunted the day before the festival and hadn't had a chance to sort through our fossils.

Tired as we were, we checked out our finds, trying to keep the grit of the fossils out of our meals.

My favorite find from that day was Vickie's triangular scute from a giant armadillo.

I've never seen one this shape before.

We also scanned her fossil cabinet with a black light

and witnessed some amazing fluorescence in rhino teeth she found years ago in Wyoming.

Love.

For your continued reading pleasure, here's the Wikipedia etymology of the word "festival"

because, try as we might, it can't be all fossils, all the time.

A festival is an event ordinarily celebrated by a community and centering on some characteristic aspect of that community and its religion or traditions. It is often marked as a local or national holiday, mela, or eid. Next to religion and folklore, a significant origin is agricultural. Food is such a vital resource that many festivals are associated with harvest time. Religious commemoration and thanksgiving for good harvests are blended in events that take place in autumn, such as Halloween in the northern hemisphere and Easter in the southern.

Festivals often serve to fulfill specific communal purposes, especially in regard to commemoration or thanksgiving. The celebrations offer a sense of belonging for religious, social, or geographical groups, contributing to group cohesiveness. They may also provide entertainment, which was particularly important to local communities before the advent of mass-produced entertainment. Festivals that focus on cultural or ethnic topics also seek to inform community members of their traditions; the involvement of elders sharing stories and experience provides a means for unity among families.

In Ancient Greece and Rome, festivals such as the Saturnalia were closely associated with social organisation and political processes as well as religion. In modern times, festivals may be attended by strangers such as tourists, who are attracted to some of the more eccentric or historical ones.

The word "festival" was originally used as an adjective from the late fourteenth century, deriving from Latin via Old French. In Middle English, a "festival dai" was a religious holiday. Its first recorded used as a noun was in 1589 (as "Festifall"). Feast first came into usage as a noun circa 1200,  and its first recorded use as a verb was circa 1300. The term "feast" is also used in common secular parlance as a synonym for any large or elaborate meal. When used as in the meaning of a festival, most often refers to a religious festival rather than a film or art festival. In the Philippines and many other former Spanish colonies, the Spanish word fiesta is used to denote a communal religious feast to honor a patron saint.

Seriously...Never Again!

Hoisted by my own petard.

I think all 3 of us had said, "Never again,"

in regards to launching in Ft. Meade from a location that required we load our kayaks on wheels and roll them with all our gear on the longest 1000' path in recorded history, but it's hard to quit a place when there are fossils to be found.

This is Pam and me at the end of the day, mustering just enough energy to smile.

I wish those were big mammoth bones on our kayaks but they are just pieces of driftwood, as if we didn't have enough stuff to haul.  

It was a perfect day,

weather-wise, and we all found some fossils,

but not good enough to launch from here

Ever again.

I swear.

I really mean it this time.

There's always that first hour

when I haven't really found anything and I briefly think,

"Why didn't I bring beer?"

but things usually improve from there.

One of my first finds was this perfect fat tapir cap with gorgeous color and texture.

These photos don't do it justice.

And the next screen yielded this tooth:

It looks like a complete small tapir tooth.  

I did a little tapir research and the remains of at least 6 different fossil tapir species have been found in Florida so maybe this is from a baby tapir or a baby-sized tapir species.

One of my (many pointless) pet peeves is the occasional close-ups of the nasty undersides of women's nails when they post fossil pics.  My nails were clean in this photo but I had to do a little touchup work on my raggedy cuticles.  I've given them a gentle hazy glow, as if they'd just been soaked in Palmolive.

Back to the tapir teeth...maybe.

So is this a tiny tapir canine?  It's hard to tell from the photo but it lacks the angle that I've seen in many pinniped fossil teeth.  It really does resemble the few tapir canines I've found, except that it's so small.  I'm going to need ID help.

And there's this:

I looked at photos of tapir teeth and it looks like a tapir incisor.

But here's a photo of the most beautiful creature of all:

My Roomba!

Roomba was a Christmas gift from Tom and probably the best present I've ever gotten and...

oh, yes... the fossils in the foreground.

These 3 teeth are all a bit beat up but mostly whole: horse, camelid(?), and bison.

The horse tooth has a very interesting pattern on both sides:

I assume something happened during the fossilization process to cause this but it's the first time I've seen anything like it.

I was pretty much skunked on glyptodont,

with the exception of this fragment shown here with an antler butt.

Pam took up the glyptodont mantle on this trip by finding several nice specimens of scutes.

Little piece of jaw with 4 teeth:

Maybe rabbit.

It's been a good spot for gator:

Unfortunately, the biggest tooth in the photo is broken on the other side

 and when I say "broken",  I mean the other side ain't there.

The tiniest echinoid in matrix:

Not in great shape but I though it was cool.

Deer teeth:

A big fat blue tiger:

More shark teeth and more fodder for the jar of mid-shell turtle scutes:

On the off chance that all those teeth I found are, indeed, tapir,

here's some more info on Florida fossil tapirs

taken from the Fossils Treasures of Florida website:

Fossil Tapirs are very abundant in the fossil record of Florida. In fact, there may be more of these Prehistoric Tapir Skeletons found in Florida than any other place in the world.

This is a primitive hoofed browser with a trunk-like nose.  The short trunk is used to sniff out and guide vegetation into the mouth.  In general, they look like a large dark pig with a small trunk.

There are 4 species of Tapirs alive today, but most people are not too familiar with them, if at all.  There nearest relatives are the horses and rhinos.

This “living fossil” had hoofed toes, with 3 toes on the back legs and 4 toes on the front.  They have evolved this adaptation over time and it gives them the ability to better walk in silt, clays and overall marshy ground.  Appearing in the Early Eocene around 55 Million Years ago, this ice age mammal was a member of the Perissodactyls, or “odd-toed” ungulates.

They have a full set of low-crowned teeth with distinct ridges, and chisel-shaped incisors.

As the land bridge of Panama formed between North and South America 3 million years ago, it opened up a travel route for Tapirs to migrate into South America.  Of the 4 modern types of Tapir, three species are in Central and South America, and one is in Southeast Asia.

The type specimen of Tapirus veroensis was discovered at Vero Beach (Vero), Florida, and was named by E.H. Sellards, in 1918.  Sellards was the Florida State Geologist at the time.  A virtually complete Fossil Tapir Skull of Tapirus veroensis was discovered.  The specimen was thought to be rare at the time, but now is considered the most common species of fossil Tapir, in Florida. Tapirus veroensis species went extinct around 11,000 Years ago.

The oldest known Tapir from the fossil record of Florida is a lower fossil tooth that was discovered from the Early Miocene Period in Hernando County, Florida. 

There are at the minimum, 6 extinct fossil species of Tapirus known to have lived in Florida.  These are:  Tapirus veroensis, Tapirus haysii, Tapirus lundeliusi, Tapirus webbi, Tapirus polkensis, and Tapirus simpsoni.