May the Force Be With You!

Tell me these do not look like little Darth Vaders?!

Or a front view of the alien from Alien?

What these fossils come from is an equally alien-looking creature:

I've caught these "searobins" surf-fishing on Cape Canaveral Seashore.  I always hate having to touch those "fingers" when I unhook them.

The waters of the Peace River is are too high for digging so I made my way into one of the nearby creeks, riding on the coattails of fossil friends who had already scouted out the area.  

                                      

We spent a day digging in shallow gravel that held a number of little surprises, including that whole passel of searobin skulls.

Shark teeth were well-represented 

in the sandy gravel where we dug.

Duskies galore!

A smattering of tigers,

sand tigers,

lemons,

and makos, etc. 

But wait!  There's more!

I pulled some hemis and a meg out of there...

as well as a few unusual little shark teeth.

Some mammal fossils...

The top 2 photos are the back and side views of a tapir incisor.  

The bottom 2 photos are a chunk of mammoth tooth showing the chewing surface and a scute from a giant armadillo.

I also found several scutes from normal sized armadillos (i.e. small).

Here's a smorgasbord of small fossils...

I'll go clockwise starting upper left.

Porcupine fish mouth plates, a tilly bone and directly under it a fossilized root/twig, fragments of ray tail spines, drum fish tooth and snake vertebra. Between the fish mouth plates and ray spines are 2 very small dermal denticles from sting rays.  Below the snake vertebra are barracuda teeth, armadillo scutes (middle of photo), garfish scales, and an assortment of alligator teeth.  

Nice!

I'll round the photo gallery out with a photo of middle shell scutes from turtles...

and some other turtle/tortoise fossils.  I especially like the edge of the shell piece.

We all "Indiana Jones" today!

Even Indiana Jones had to start somewhere,

so ignore the neatly clipped lawn and tire swing and

give yourself over to adventure!

I finally got to visit the fabled creek that my fossil club co-members had been digging and flooding FaceBook with photos of their fabulous finds.  I wish I could have gone in the early salad days but my schedule did not permit it.  The creek is small and the discoveries were rapidly dwindling so by the time I drove the 3 hours to get there this weekend, some exploration was needed to find new and fertile fossil grounds.

My team of 3 had planned to walk the creek, probing for gravel the whole way, but recent heavy rains  meant that some areas had us wading through chest-deep black water and fighting strong currents.

I don't like being startled!

Whether it be an alligator bumping into me under water (which has never happened) or a stick floating downstream and hitting me in the back (which has happened a lot),

the resulting screech will be the same.

We went through some desensitization today as the water was full of all kinds of invisible obstacles.

My first find of the day was this old bottle

but after about a mile of slow progress, we hadn't found much in the way of fossils so we decided to climb out of the creek and walk back through the orange groves.  

The only problem was we were on an island of cypress knees with a deep channel of rushing water separating us from the bank.  Joe slogged/swam across with difficulty which made Staci and me a bit nervous so we had him pull us across, one at a time, as we clung to a fossil screen.

Where's the GoPro when you need it?!!!

Here's Staci in a stand of cypress knees in calmer water.

Now, imagine us looking worried, clinging to that screen with the pool noodles attached, while the ferryman pulls us across the channel.  

Yes, we agreed afterward that it was kinda fun. 

We retreated back to the original honey hole

by the tire swings and manicured lawn and managed to wrest a few last treasures from the depleted gravel including this big cow tooth that Staci found.

My weekend wasn't a total bust.

My very first whale tooth!

It has been beaten to hell and back but unless I find a better one, it will stay in my collection.

Puffer fish palate paradise.

Some very pretty shark teeth,

including a tiny tooth in matrix.

Three horse teeth.

Ray mouth plates galore.

I enjoyed the spiral shell casts.

Odds and ends.

(Chewed up deer tine, turtle scutes, tortoise spurs, sea robin nose plate, deer tooth, "Indian beads")

My favorite find was this little tooth.

Just the right amount of adventure for me.

My ".com" Fossil Boom

I love the internet,

even though I'm still not very good at surfing it.

I recently went on a long road trip from Florida to Missouri and used the internet to locate fossil possibilities along the way.  I thought I had everything planned out until I stopped for my midmorning nap in the back seat of my truck outside of Valdosta, GA.  Instead of snoozing, I started surfing only to locate a potential fossil shale site a few hours north of me in Trenton, Ga.  The detour  took me a out an hour out of my way so I skipped the nap and got back on the road.

The first challenge is FINDING the fossil site.

The directions for this site were fairly precise but I still had to stop and ask some locals where the road was.  Then I was supposed to look for an old sign for the Durham Coal Co.  As luck would have it, that sign has now been replaced with this sign:

Doesn't get any more specific than that!

I pulled off the road and got out to see what was what.

A very short walk from the truck was a hillside littered with shale.  It's obvious that a lot of people, probably a lot of students, come here regularly to dig shale chunks out of the old coal mine spoil piles in search of fossils.  

My turn!

The website said I could find plant fossils deposited between the Cambrian and Pennsylvanian periods (504-300 million years ago) and all the shale tumbling down the hillside contained what looked like compressed palm fronds as in the rock in the photo above.

I wanted more variety so I started digging.  I quickly realized I needed to target the tan shale as opposed to the black shale which gave me an impressive peak into that ancient world.

All the shale was exceptionally fragile.  The layers were more folded than flat and didn't want to break cleanly and the rocks were very soft.

I collected a nice stack of rocks and was back on the road in a couple of hours.

When I finally returned home and sorted my fossils, I thought I would just get on the internet and ID a few of these plants.

Why won't the internet hand me the answers I seek on a silver platter?!!!

It really is fascinating to read about how the oxygen levels were so different in the Paleozoic and how it helped shape which plants and animals evolved during that time.  A whole catalogue of plants that are now extinct.  Lots of ferns, primitive trees, and rushes but too many for me to easily ID any of my little fossils.  

That's ok.

I'll just enjoy them as they are and continue to keep stuffing info into my brain until something clicks.

At least I didn't run into an internet site proclaiming the plants were brought here by aliens, although I'm sure such a site exists. 

Drunken Fossiling

I call it "rehydration solution."

Don't you judge!

I really want to be a part of the trend of doing an activity in a drunken state and then posting the results on YouTube but I don't have the stamina to actually kayak and dig for fossils all day in a drunken state.  

Maybe I'll try "Drunken Fossil Sorting" 

for my YouTube debut but doesn't that conjure images of broken fossils?!

Better stick with the occasional nip for medicinal purposes only.

My geologist sister-in-law

says she is a "catch and release" fossil hunter.

I've decided I'm a "share the love" fossil hunter.  My house is small so I keep my favorite finds and share the rest with my fossil club and any friends who are interested.

I just took a load down to Ft. Myers in preparation for the club's annual Fossil Fest in February.

Tragedy struck

at the fossil meeting; or so I thought.

I dropped my 20 lb palm frond that I found in Washington, creating the crack you can see on the left in the photo above.

Can't cry over spilled (or dropped) fossils so I waited until I got home to pull the pieces apart.

I was thrilled to find and even better palm frond inside!

It's the only one I have that shows the connection point of the stem.

I'm not going to make a habit of dropping my fossils (unless I take up Drunken Fossiling) but I'm glad it worked out this time.

I just participated in a kayak trip on the Suwannee

with my non-fossil kayak group.

I took a screen and shovel, as I always do, in hopes of finding gravel, but I have yet to find a place to dig when I'm with this group.

The 21 mile stretch that we paddled was lined with lots of swiss-cheese limestone and I managed to collect some echinoids.

I'm most proud of my creative foot warmers.

My feet get chilled, even when it's not that cold out, and I hate to wear wet dive boots all day while I paddle.  I bought a pair of inexpensive, water-proof boot covers for motorcyclists and inside those, I wear a light sock with a self-warming insole.  

Bliss!

Barefoot and preoccupied in Arkansas

Fossil hunting locations often lack curb appeal.

Another ditch, another day.

I've been consulting the web page findingrocks.com and while most of the info is outdated or extremely vague, I've managed to glean some productive fossil sites from it.
A combination of a road trip and some findingrocks.com research recently took me on a tour of 

"Arkansas' Least Appealing Ditches"

 (I'm claiming that as a title for a future reality series).
These ditches give access to the Fayetteville shale of northern Arkansas which dates to the Mississippian period (approx. 354-323 million years old).  I was on the hunt for small pyritized ammonoids (a group of cephalopods which also contained ammonites).

Ditch #1

This is an extremely public ditch, flanked by an interstate on one side and a busy access road on the other and, as always when working an area like this, I have to wonder,

"Why the frack are you honking at me?!"

Seriously, drivers, shouldn't you be texting or something?

I grabbed a bucketful of the rounded, disk-shaped concretions that findingrocks.com said might have ammonoids inside.  

My favorite is this rock that looks like a mashed Moon Pie:

Ditch #2

 I know: breathtaking.

When I started searching the ground behind the dumpster I initially thought someone had been shooting skeet...

but the red fragments turned out to be the target concretions. 

I started to hammer at them with my rock pick which attracted the attention of a wandering businessman on lunch break.  He approached, asking what I was looking for and peering into my bucket where he saw a bottle of my rheumatism medicine (IPA) and several unassuming round red rocks.  Five seconds into my explanation of "Fayetteville shale" his eyes glazed over and he went back to work.

I found one ammonoid fossil:

but after cracking several rocks and only finding interesting, fossil-free formations:

I headed over to...

Ditch #3

This is the kind of ditch I could stay in all day:

loads of interesting rocks and a bit of privacy.

I could've even strung a hammock from the sewage pipe for whenever I needed a break from wading barefoot in the leech-infested sludge.

Ok, I exaggerate.

The water looked like normal creek water and the leech-y looking critters never actually adhered to my skin.

Paradise!

Once again, I started looking for rounded concretions but my eye was constantly drawn to the "turtle" concretions which have the appearance of fossilized turtle shell but, well, aren't.

I wasn't planning on taking any of them home until I noticed that one of them was covered with ammonoid fossils:

and another huge one was going to look fabulous on my deck:

...and the stack of rocks that had to get from the bottom of a deep ditch to the back of my truck continued to grow...

The ditch was cut out of soft shale that didn't seem to have any fossils in it until I waded upstream and noticed the character of the shale was a little different: firmer with some visible, tiny ammonoids.  The daylight was waning so I grabbed the biggest chunk of shale I could manage and began to enact my exit strategy.  

I have learned that loading my least favorite rocks first ensures against the culling of my finds due to exhaustion.  That big, beautiful turtle concretion was my impetus to haul every rock in my pile up the steep sides of the ditch and through a field of stick-tights and wild blackberry shrubs.

There was a lot of cursing involved.

It was all worth it!

Lots and lots of rocks to examine and think about.  Slowly splitting the fragile layers of my hunk of shale has revealed perfect tiny pyritized snails, ammonoids, and other shells.  My old camera with the amazing macro setting finally died and these macro shots are lacking so if you can't actually see the fabulous detail on these tiny shells, know that it's there.

I'm thinking of having these jewels set in a three-finger ring.

;-)