Taking advantage of a holiday

Monday was Presidents' Day

which doesn't actually affect my fossil schedule

since I have Mondays off, but after a weekend of visiting with friends in south Florida and volunteering at the Fossil Club of Lee County's Fossil Fest, 

I needed some shovel time!

So I'll start with the best news...

I found me a saber cat carnassial!!!

It's a broken saber cat carnassial, but a big cat tooth all the same.

Look at it...

Look at it some more...

Mesmerizing, isn't it?

Here's a drawing. 350 to 600 lbs.  Yikes!

I also found another plateful of glyptodont scutes as well as 2 perfect giant armadillo scutes

and 2 regular size armadillo scutes and one shabby gator scute.

It's not a lucrative spot but it produces some great fossils.

A very nice 3-toed horse tooth:

Bison:

Gator teeth and vertebra (with a couple of other verts thrown in:

A HUGE garfish scale:

A modern chunk of cow jaw:

More pretty turtle material:

And lots of odds and ends:

Let's see...lots of small shark teeth including a couple of nice hemis, horse teeth, ray mouth plates and dermal denticles, a toe bone, etc.

So here's the part where I'll ramble on a bit to try and get more actual words into my blog

instead of just fabulous photos.

Maybe a couple more photos:

Here's Tom with our coral table at the Fossil Club of Lee County's Fossil Fest.

It was his first time being a vendor and he enjoyed the process.  I've tried being a vendor of different things over the years and I'm not good at it.  I don't have the patience to answer the same questions over and over again.  I would excel as a coral merchandiser, just refilling coral bins and not talking to anyone which is probably why I do better with the eBay side of things. 

I manned the silent auction table for the club.

That's me on the left.  The photographer snuck up on us for the first shot so of course I protested and demanded and re-do.  You gotta give us time to get our faces right.

The silent auction is a good format for me.  It's fast and furious and there's no time to explain things.  15 minutes per lot.  You want it?!  Bid on it!!

It's a good little fossil fest, held for the second year in a row at The Shell Factory in Ft. Myers, Florida, and hopefully we'll grow it in the future.

We have some fossil hunting planned this weekend but it's raining at the moment.

Which I hate!

But unless there is a freak hurricane, we'll find somewhere to dig.

Glyptodont Heaven Was a Hungry Place

I spent another 2 days in glyptodont heaven 

but apparently these mo-fo's didn't eat coz I haven't found hide nor hair of a tooth!

I found several more scutes and Tom found the 

piece de resistance,

several scutes that hadn't broken apart yet.  Rare!

We enjoyed a beautiful night of camping

although by the time everyone insisted on their creature comforts

it was a heavy load for just one night.

The wild, seed-grown citrus that has spread out from local citrus farms is unusually  tasty (normally it is painfully sour)

so Vickie foraged a bagful that was almost as big as her,

but don't be fooled!  She is a Zen master and former karate aficionado and one of the toughest ladies I know.  Here she practices a move:

This might not seem so hard but try it after one of Jim's custom blended Bloody Marys

Oof!

The area isn't brimming with fossils

but moving lots of gravel had its rewards.

My most exciting find:

What a thrill to see that in my screen!

I also recovered a big chunk of gomphothere in an area of relatively small gravel.

Tom continues to rake in the big gator teeth:

I want this bone to be bison but it's so perfect and as it dries, it's getting lighter and lighter...

Moooo!

Very nice giant armadillo scutes with one regular size armadillo scute thrown in for scale.

Imagine those next to the highway rooting around in the grass!

Tiny finds are cool because my big screen usually lets them sift away.  Here's a little tooth, still in a piece of jawbone that didn't wash back into the river.

I've been studying mammal dentition on the internet and it's not easy.  I think this looks like a very small camelid premolar but when I Googled "llama premolar" I pulled up Spanish-language dental charts for humans.  I love the world wide web but it's not perfect.  YET!

More nice teeth.

And horse, of course!

Intricately patterned turtle scutes.

And now for the part where I write and try to increase the "content" of my posts.

Today I'd like to say a bit about manicures and fossil photos.  Digging in the rivers for fossils tears your hands up and does a number on fingernails.  We all get it.  I don't often wear nail polish as it won't stay on and that's not just when I'm fossiling.  I'm a hair stylist by profession and a pretty manicure doesn't stand a chance.  Men keep their nails short so the following doesn't apply to them.

There's nothing yuckier than a closeup of a woman's hand holding a fossil in her palm and exposing the underside of her acrylics.  EEK!!!  It looks bad enough on a good day but a whole dimension of horror is added when they are waterlogged and crusted with mud and sand.  

Crop those dragon ladies out of the photos, girls!  

I recently decided to get a gel polish manicure (and yes, gin was involved in that decision making process) and I was amazed that the polish stayed on through 3 days of doing hair and 2 days of digging in the Peace.  The down side was that when I wanted it off, I had to use a grinder and industrial strength acetone and my nails were trashed afterwards. 

Well, I wasn't going to pay them even more to remove the stuff!  So, instead of being a slave to my nails, I will continue with short, natural nails and when I photograph fossils in my palm, I'll continue to position them over my calluses for a better closeup.