The Happy "F's" of Fossil Hunting

I'm not going to say the list is endless

but there are a lot of positive "F" words we associate with fossil hunting

and really only one negative "F" word

(and I know I use it too much when I'm digging and not finding).

I'm not going to include the word "fear" in either category

although here is a montage of the alligators I was able to photograph

 on ONE kayak ride back to the boat ramp:

There were at least as many others that dipped under the water before I could snap a photo.

We are aware of them, respect them, and keep our distance and hopefully, they will continue to keep their distance as well.

I'm also not going to include the word "futility" 

which is how the season is shaping up for me.

Here's what I would've sworn was my first whole mammoth tooth:

I'm trying to be a good sport about this Treetop apple juice bottle that I carefully spent 30 minutes digging up but I definitely used that other "F" word when I realized what it was.

Friends

Tom entitled this photo "Ewok Village."

Food

Well, gin is kind of like food.  It fuels my happy post-digging attitude.

I marked that bottle for safety in case someone got a hankering to take a big swig of diet tonic water.

Fun

We all have fun in our own way and sorting fossils is our kind of fun.

Fire

Fire is a definite plus when camping.  It's a great mood elevator and I finally got around to building us a clothes rack so that we can dry our digging clothes at the end of the day.  Makes for a more pleasant morning when we get dressed to get back in the river.

There are many more positive "F" words but I'll finish with the obvious one,

Fossils

We were all shocked when Pam unearthed this coral head.  We've never found anything like it in this area of the Peace River before.  Cool!

I found my largest chunk of mastodon tooth to date.  I found it right next to where Pam found the coral head which was weird because we didn't find much of anything else in that whole area.

Piece of rodent jaw with teeth.  Maybe rabbit.  

I had to make a choice: spend the afternoon trying to ID it through Google, or write my dang post.

A decent selection of scute, giant armadillo on top and glyptodont below but still, that's 3 days of hard digging.  Sigh...

Just a piece of pig jaw but I like finding jaw bone with teeth. 

Gator tooth selection and what I think may be a gator vert.

I really wanted the first tooth to be something special but it's just a very nice horse tooth.

Middle tooth is horse and last tooth is bison.

Garfish scales and another osteoderm that we think are from one of the giant ground sloths.  

Weird that these furry mammals had all this armor plating under their skin.

A selection of turtle and tortoise fossils.

Cute little bone.

And when a season is as bad as mine has been, you gotta post even the fragments of teeth that you find.  This photo includes tapir, horse, bison (I think), camelid, and deer.

So here's a little blurb from Wikipedia about the letter "F".

The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter vâv (or waw) that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace(transliterated as ḥ(dj)):

The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,' despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles it in form.

After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.) When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) not only for the vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving 'F' available for /f/. And so out of the various vavvariants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.

The lowercase 'f' is not related to the visually similar long s, 'ſ' (or medial s). The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with 'f' when using a short mid-bar (see more at: S).