The Morning After

     I am no spring chicken

and continuing to refer to myself as "middle-aged" is starting to sound desperately hopeful 

but I'll keep going to the river as long as I can.  The morning after a day of digging is no picnic; every muscle is sore and either cramped up or falling asleep.  The jury is out on which feels worse.

     This weekend, Pam and I headed out on another prospecting trip, probing the sand for gravel as we move along the river. 

It was bound to happen.

     I had the probe buried in the sand when it slipped out of my hand and my kayak kept going.  Crap!  I hope Mike can bend it back for me.

 We were getting bored with the prospecting so when we found what looked like a popular digging spot, we jumped right in with our shovels.

fossil coral

    I was surprised to immediately start finding good stuff in such a well-dug area.  One of my first loads of gravel yielded this 3" meg:

     It is not perfect but I would call it a 90% meg and it's the largest megalodon tooth I've found so far!

I found some big bones, too.

     Now that's a big vertebra!  I have no idea what animal it might be from so I'll take it to the next club meeting I attend and see what the other members think.

     Another big bone, possible part of a foot bone from a mammoth or mastodon.  An hour of Googling didn't bring me any closer to a definite ID.  I'm calling it "Big Bone".

     I would love to think that an ancient human wore this around their neck but a much more plausible answer is a type of worm that bores holes through a lot of the fossil material we find.  The hole is actually a little too perfect to have been made by a human.

     This is a nice chunk of mastodon tooth with part of the chewing surface on top.

Here's a perfect shell cast that I found:

top

side

     The shell filled with mud which eventually turned to stone and the shell, itself, wore away.

Group photo of the good stuff

My 3" meg is on the right and the broken meg on the left measures 4".

If only it was whole!

     It was a beautiful day on the river and even though we overdid it with the digging, I still had enough energy to try and take some photos.  I don't have the best camera to convey the beauty of the river but you get the idea.

     Unfortunately, the beauty is marred by too  much of this:

     These beverages got to the river in a plastic bag, a cardboard box, or a cooler and it was probably fairly heavy when all the bottles and cans were full.   The cans and bottles are lightweight after the contents are consumed so why are they not loaded back into the bag, box, or cooler, and tossed in a trash can or recycling bin?  It confounds me that, in this day and age, people will still walk away and leave their garbage on the ground.  

     That's my lecture for the day.  Now, back to sleep to try and recover before next weekend!