Mining for fossil gold

     My first, and so far only, trip to the Mosaic phosphate mine took place in early November 2012.  I got the directions to the area of the mine we were going to be allowed to enter and started driving very early since it's a 2-2.5 hour drive for me to visit the Peace River area.  I met some of the other people from FCOLC as we waited to convoy our vehicles into the mine.  Everyone was very nice but my excited anxiety and crazy uncontrolled competitiveness made me a nervous wreck!

     Once we got into the mine we had to sit through an hour long presentation about the process which, while very interesting and relevant, just about drove me nuts.  I wanted to find a megalodon tooth, just like the people in the YouTube videos.  It looked so easy!

     You can Google Florida phosphate mining if you want to know more but basically huge machines drag huge "buckets" in lines through the earth creating deep channels, like small canyons.  The landscape was other-worldly, nothing but dirt and gravel as far as I could see and suddenly, it didn't seem so easy.

     The president of the fossil club walked with me for a while and gave me pointers and I quickly found a couple of broken megs as well as other small shark teeth.  

     Here is a photo of what I was hoping to see:

 After about an hour, our guide told us we would be allowed to look at a better site and we all pretty much said, "Well, what are we waiting for?!  Let's go!"  He led us to a different area of gravel mounds that were much more productive and our group scattered to the four corners.

     I was climbing along the side of a gravel hill with a long drop into a valley of mud when I spotted a white vertebra in a crevice.  It was difficult to reach but I found a handhold on the hill and reached down until I retrieved it.  Something caused me to take a closer look at my "handhold" and I discovered it was another, far larger, vertebra embedded in the sand and gravel.  I carefully started chipping away with my screwdriver.  

     The whale vertebra was an exciting find and the club members told me that the deep gouges on it's side were made by a megalodon that was feeding on it.  Good stuff!  But while I was chipping it out, a young woman came over to look, glanced down, and discovered, right by my knee, a complete megalodon in the sand.  I was crushed, jealous, anxious, heartbroken, etc, but she was so encouraging and urged me to keep looking and that I would definitely find one.  I did as she said, toting my bucket of vertebrae and tooth fragments across the rocky wasteland and not 50 feet away from her megalodon, I found my own.

     After one full season of fossiling under my belt, it is still the best meg I've found.  These sharks have been extinct for 1-2 million years.  Look at the treasure they left behind!