Establishing my new fossil home base in Kentucky

How many tons of brachiopods should one woman have?

That was the question I was asking myself as I obsessively gathered them on my third visit to Fleming County, Kentucky, to visit Miss Vickie and Jim.

I have flown to Kentucky on my last 2 visits and that limits the amount of fossils I can bring home. I usually put as many in my carry on as I think TSA will tolerate and then I ship a large flat rate box home to myself. This time, however, I got covid antsy about my return flight and checked the cost of a one way car rental from Lexington, KY, to Sanford, FL.

Affordable!

Since I didn't decide to drive home until the last day I didn't have enough time to REALLY load up that economy car but I'll keep the fly/drive method in mind for my next trip.

We spent a few hours collecting horn coral in a creek close to Vickie's home. I'm amazed at how much I've found here on the past 2 trips and then to still find beautiful pieces.

Size ranges from very small to the size of the 3 in my hand and bigger and many have beautiful areas of crystals and geode-type vugs.

Most of our time was spent collecting brachiopods in the road cuts. This is easy collecting as it's possible to pick up brachiopods while walking along the base of the road cut.

I didn't find as much branch coral this time but I found a lot of beautiful little brachiopod geodes that I literally picked out of the front of the road cuts with my fingers. Once in a while I used a small hammer and chisel but only to loosen the soft surrounding matrix. 

They are little gems and I found quite a few on this visit.

The crazy thing is we only visited a few road cuts and creeks. 

There's a lot to explore!

This road cut had an ATV track along the side so I hiked up to check it out. Luckily there wasn't anything special because I was a little nervous being up that high.

Ground level is more my speed.

Fossil hunting isn't pretty, lol.

At least I didn't have to wash all my rocks this time; I just loaded up the rental and headed home. The drive home surely wasn't fun: I left Lexington at 10:15 AM and pulled up to my house st 12:15 AM the next day, but I think I could handle that once a year.

Better than a picnic

Picnics look great in movies and magazine spreads

but I've never been able to pull it off  IRL.

Trying to deal with insects, fickle shade, and getting the contents of several Rubbermaid containers dished out onto plates without the modern convenience of a TABLE has always put me off.

But in this current environment where we are actually desperate to get outside for a change, I saw a trio of people on the river who seemed to have embraced the American gear-heavy way of life and nailed the midday picnic.

I was surprised to see they had humped a small table and chairs to the river bank (no vehicle in sight) as well as their comestibles and they seemed comfortable and content.

Even more surprising was seeing them AT ALL as I had begun to think of the river as my own private domain. Now, however, people are outside kayaking, fishing, hiking, and...picnicking!

My river picnics when I'm digging are still basic affairs:

quick bites of soggy sandwiches and handfuls of grapes between shovelfuls of gravel.

My discoveries are modest but satisfying.

I'm no longer hitting my 9 gator tooth quota but I'm still adding to my collection.

And the salad days of giant armadillos scutes are fading away although I managed to find this edge or leg scute and the cool little 5-sided scute.

But somehow, in the midst of this mediocrity,

I found a giant ground sloth tooth!

Fossil friends helped ID it as megalonyx and it is by far my best sloth tooth to date.

This bish can dig!

And...wait for it...

After all those gator teeth, FINALLY a gator scute and a fatty at that.

A surprisingly big chunk of mammoth tooth considering we only generally find slivers of enamel.

Lots of deer antler material.

And luckily I am still pulling in a good number of gorgeous tiger and hemi teeth on each visit.

And of course loads of turtle. I've been keeping the nicest shell segments again but they are already starting to pile up.

The pace of my day to day life has slowed so I feel lucky and grateful to be able to fill some of the time with a compliant hobby that I love.

A Corona-Friendly Hobby

Social Distancing is my forte!

I get peeved if I see another person when I'm digging in the river.

Fossil hunting is the perfect hobby during this confusing time as I am avoiding close contact with other people, getting some exercise, and I'm in a peaceful state of mind. I've always felt the best thing you can do for yourself is stop watching the news.

The patch of gravel I found is still producing small wonders.

This avian raptor claw core inspired me to, once again, bring a .25" screen with me, although I found this in my .5" screen. The happy medium for me is to put 2 scoops of gravel in the little screen and then load up my big screen and let the chips (or fossils) fall where they may.

This is a newly erupted tooth from a juvenile giant ground sloth.

Super cool!

I also have a super cool new sticker on my kayak:

Come on now! You know that's funny!

We ruthlessly mock the men who have these on their trucks so I bought one for a friend as a joke. He wasn't going to be caught dead with it on his truck but suggested I put it on my kayak.

I'm waiting for someone to notice.😂

And this would by my very first nurse shark tooth! AND I found it in my .5" screen!

Is it any wonder that these are hard to find? 

This little beauty is a hotly contested shark tooth.

It may be a chubutensis which is a subspecies of megalodon or it may be a tooth from a transitional megalodon species. Evolution is beautiful but it is supremely messy.

This one hole that I am digging has gifted me with a number of small botryoidal oyster geodes which are apparently as rare as hen's teeth in the Peace River. 

Added bonus: they fluoresce under UV black light.

Shut the front door!

This one has just enough of a mineral overlay on the botryoidal to make it look slightly opalescent.

Earbones in da house!

Love.

I'm not sure what animal begat the one on the left but the other 2 are from a dolphin: a bulla and a periotic. 

Nice haul of giant armadillo scutes in complete condition. This represents 2 days of digging.

This is 2 days worth of alligator teeth. 

The truly weird thing about this location is I have found exactly 9 alligator teeth each day that I have dug there. What are the odds?!

You know me and tapir caps: 👍

Fish mouth plates and garfish scales.

Some random stingray material but check out the size of that barb fragment!

That was a biggun'!

Tiny rodent jaw, rodent tooth, armadillo scute, cute little turtle peace sign scute and a couple of fish verts.

Lots and lots of antler material but only the occasional antler butt.

And loads of tigers...

...and hemis.

I still have some work to do there.

I'm Still Kickin'

It's Been A While

I took a break from my fossil blog
to follow some other interests, for example,
going to Trinidad & Tobago for Carnival!

But that trip will needs its own blog. :-)

I spent a couple of disheartened years after Hurricane Irma covered up glyptodont heaven, doing a lot of prospecting that yielded nothing, resulting in my 2 worst fossiling seasons since I started this hobby, not to mention wet winters where the water levels didn't cooperate on the days I could dig.
But I've recommitted to my fossil passion.
My back is aging, discs bulging, and none of us know how long we will physically be able to do the things we enjoy.  I'm still playing volleyball and gosh darnit,
I'm still digging!

I started prospecting again and quickly found us a spot that while it's certainly no honey hole, it does provide a steady stream of little goodies that keep me interested. I only got to dig there 3 times because it's a very shallow area and we won't be able to get back until the river level goes back up but those 3 visits added a good chunk of alligator teeth to my alligator tooth jar.

It's been a decent spot for giant armadillo scutes, as well, yielding 2 to 3 good scutes each time.
When I looked back, I was shocked to see that I started this blog in 2013.
I had 2 goals in mind for my blog. The first was to make it easy for my friends and family to see exactly what I was doing and finding. I will say, with maybe a touch of hurt, that my family and non-fossil friends admitted long ago that they never looked at my blog. I used to beg them just to click on it so that I would get "traffic" and that didn't happen.
Disappointing because my second goal for my blog was to monetize it in order to offset the costs of gas and gear needed for my hobby. The other big disappointment for goal 2 was that I was never able to figure out how to monetize it. Millions of bloggers monetize their blogs every year yet it eluded me. Using blogger (which is a free service and I need FREE) should be easy but as I dug into the monetizing info it looked more like I needed to be a web designer to accomplish my goal.

(Deer tines)
I got to a certain point in the process and was informed by Google AdSense that I had too many photos and not enough words in my blog.
Well, my middle name is "TLDR" so I thought I was doing people a favor.
I added more words and after I did that for a while, I found someone who works as a web designer/programmer/computer guru.
He ran into a road block that he couldn't get around and I decided it was time to take a blog-cation.
Now I feel rested and refreshed; ready not only to dig but to write again.

I even convinced Pam that the 39º mornings would warm up into beautiful afternoons and she fell for it.  She was even nice enough to bring a camp burner and Cup'O Noodles for two this weekend.

It's all well and good to dig for ancient little treasures but it's so much more fun to share my finds and f*ck the word count. 

Lots of crystalized oyster shell in our digging area.
 I decided to keep this perfect little beauty for the curio cabinet.

Pam pointed out that some of the oyster shell had botryoidal in it so I kept my eyes peeled and found this great specimen.

Your eyes are not deceiving you! Aimee, the meg-less wonder, actually found a few small megs.

Horse and deer tooth.

Good hauls of tiger shark teeth and...

hemis, and of course...

lots and lots of turtle.
We'll have to prospect this coming weekend so it remains to be seen if I'll have anything to write about next week.
Fingers crossed!