New digs

     Last Friday morning I headed upstream alone.  I feel fairly brave as long as the sun is fully up and I'm on a stretch of the river that I am familiar with.
     I felt like prospecting which usually means a lot of poking around but very little discovery.  I decided to start by digging underneath someone else's discard pile because I'm mostly hoping to find what other fossilers have missed but my screen kept filling up with broken beer bottles, more than I've ever dug up in one small hole.  HOWEVER, I was finding very nice shark teeth:  fat tigers, lemons, and clean hemis.  I began to wonder if the past diggers had been screening with chicken wire, letting everything but the biggest fossils fall back into the river.
     Still, I was discouraged and packed up to move downstream and eventually meet up with Jack.
     I was about 60 feet along my way when I realized I had forgotten one of my probes in the river.  I stood in the water, hanging onto the tow rope of my kayak, debating going back for it since it is just a thrift store golf club with the head cut off, but waste not want not; back I went!
     As I levered the probe out of the sand and gravel, I surveyed the same area again.  It seemed a waste to give up when I was finding so many good shark teeth so I decided to try again in a different spot.  I started digging about 6 feet away from my original hole and was rewarded for sticking with it.

     The new hole, so close to the old one, didn't have any glass in it and yielded a nice variety of small fossils, the best of which are in the above photo.  Lots of beautiful shark teeth and ray and fish mouth fossils, as well as meg material (inc 1 complete small meg with just a chip off one side of the root), a modern jaw bone (fox? racoon?  Need more research), horse tooth, big camelid tooth, and a large canine, probably bear.

     I'm super excited about that!  I put a pic on the Fossil Forum and they agreed it was most probably bear.  I'm always nervous posting on the Fossil Forum because they are very serious guys and don't take kindly to newbies who might waste their time but they seriously know their stuff.

     The above photo is a top view of the bear canine.  Beauty!  I have to show it off to a few more people then it goes into the curio cabinet.

     And to top off a pretty good day, I wandered into a gas station I hadn't visited before and found they had a well-stocked survival section.  Good to know on weekends when I am camping in the area.