Rain
All season long I've been keeping tabs on the water level in the Peace River by checking the online gage.
The message is clear.
The river don't want me no more.
My last 2 visits were fairly typical for this season: no fireworks, just basic fossils. I first went to the area I had been working for over a month of Fridays...
...and found another satisfyingly big chunk of mammoth tooth as well as some impressive dugong/manatee ribs. Those rib bones add up as they are fairly common in the Peace River.
I started lining my deck railing with them.
I also found another handful of mixed horse teeth and a porpoise tooth.
The top 2 are "modern" equus, meaning Pleistocene epoch horses before they became extinct in the Americas. It wasn't until the Spanish started riding roughshod over the new world that horses were reintroduced to our continents. The bottom 3 "horse" teeth are from ancestors of equus that I had gotten into the habit of calling "3-toed horse", an ancestor of equus, but then I read a lengthy discussion on The Fossil Forum and learned that the modern horse had MANY ancestors and not all of them were 3-toed and even a modern horse can be born with a vestigial toe or two.
I studied this chart for about 5 minutes before deciding, in the future, to just say "pre-equus."
I'm back to thinking I'm done with that location. I found some great stuff but for the work put into it, I could have been prospecting and potentially found some fabulous stuff.
Case in point:
I made a 5 hour pilgrimage to the fossil club meeting and saw the fruits of another hunter's labors.
I definitely put in the effort but, as I'm often reminded, some of it is luck, too.
His booty from this location includes a mastodon tooth (on the table in front of the large vertebra), several beautiful 3+" megalodon teeth, and several big makos. I have yet to find even ONE tooth anywhere near this quality (wiping tears from my cheeks) but I must look on the bright side and acknowledge that this means there's more out there so I will continue my search!
Meanwhile, back in my sad world...
I made what could be my last trip to the river this season. The water was high so I went to an area that is normally dry land and well dug. A couple of nice gator teeth and...
...a couple of nice hemis (with the end of a shotgun shell for scale), but not much else.
My biggest find of the day seemed to sum it all up:
Better luck next season!
The summer is a good time to regroup: catch up on household projects, create some fossil jewelry for my first fossil show as a vendor, get my back and my mind right with some yoga (can you say, "Ommmm...."?), and head up to Jacksonville again for some lighthearted shark tooth hunting.
I'll keep you in the loop. :-)
