Caloosahatchee Easy (whadya call me?!)

Or...
I hope you like shells.

I don't dislike shells

but that's not what I'm looking for when I'm fossil hunting.

I recently went on an expedition to the Caloosahatchee River with Miss Vickie, Mike from FCOLC, and his buddy, Keith.  Mike had been flossin' at the recent fossil festival, showing off a box of amazing light colored makos that his uncle found along the banks of the Caloosahatchee River in south Florida.

Are you kidding me?!  I'm in!!!

Vickie and I met at the appointed place at the usual early appointed hour 

and due to a faulty brake light wire, she worked some down home magic

 to deal with the situation:

The boat yard where we met was a very interesting place, a little world of its own, completely hidden from the main road:

To me, it looked a bit more like a boat graveyard but I was assured that some of the boats would see water again.  Some day.

Hunting this river is very different from digging in the Peace.

Much of the Caloosahatchee has been dredged to accommodate large boats so digging and screening isn't possible.  Instead, searching is done along the banks, where new material is constantly being dislodged by boat waves, and checking out exposures of spoil piles
 where dredged material has been dumped.

It's a much more relaxed pace.

Especially relaxed since we didn't have to spend much time picking up fossils.
The USGS web site states that the mollusk bearing sediments of southern Florida contain some of the most abundant and diverse fossil faunas in the world but our hunting yielded more in the "dearth" category than "abundance".
Tempers flared.

Luckily, there were no serious shovel injuries.
So...besides this bullet,


 and this horse tooth and giant armadillo scute,

I found shells.
Old shells.

I have a fossil friend who is a shell expert and he helped me with the ID's.
I like the bivalves that have both sides and the plicatula marginata had a surprise when I put it under the black light:


I'm glad, as always, to say that I took part in a new experience
and the Caloosahatchee might be a good spot to check out again
 when the Peace River is too high to hunt.
I'll end with some close ups of the shells I kept and some more info about the Caloosahatchee formation of Florida.





From the USGS web site:

Shelly sediments of Plio-Pleistocene age (Pliocene/Pleistocene) at surface, covers 9 % of this area

Shelly sediments of Plio-Pleistocene age - Tertiary-Quaternary Fossiliferous Sediments of Southern Florida - Molluskbearing sediments of southern Florida contain some of the most abundant and diverse fossil faunas in the world. The origin of these accumulations of fossil mollusks is imprecisely known (Allmon, 1992). The shell beds have attracted much attention due to the abundance and preservation of the fossils but the biostratigraphy and lithostratigraphy of the units has not been well defined (Scott, 1992). Scott and Wingard (1995) discussed the problems associated with biostratigraphy and lithostratigraphy of the Plio-Pleistocene in southern Florida. These "formations" are biostratigraphic units. The "formations" previously recognized within the latest Tertiary-Quaternary section of southern Florida include the latest Pliocene - early Pleistocene Caloosahatchee Formation, the early Pleistocene Bermont formation (informal) and the late Pleistocene Fort Thompson Formation. This section consists of fossiliferous sands and carbonates. The identification of these units is problematic unless the significant molluscan species are recognized. Often exposures are not extensive enough to facilitate the collection of representative faunal samples to properly discern the biostratigraphic identification of the formation. In an attempt to alleviate the inherent problems in the biostratigraphic recognition of lithostratigraphic units, Scott (1992) suggested grouping the latest Pliocene through late Pleistocene Caloosahatchee, Bermont and Fort Thompson Formations in to a single lithostratigraphic entity, the Okeechobee formation (informal). In mapping the shelly sands and carbonates, a generalized grouping as Tertiary-Quaternary shell units (TQsu) was utilized. This is equivalent to the informal Okeechobee formation. The distribution of the Caloosahatchee and Fort Thompson Formation are shown on previous geologic maps by Cooke (1945), Vernon and Puri (1964) and Brooks (1982). The Nashua Formation occurs within the Pliocene - Pleistocene in northern Florida. However, it crops out or is near the surface is an area too small to be shown on a map of this scale. Lithologically these sediments are complex, varying from unconsolidated, variably calcareous and fossiliferous quartz sands to well indurated, sandy, fossiliferous limestones (both marine and freshwater). Clayey sands and sandy clays are present. These sediments form part of the surficial aquifer system

     

The Happy "F's" of Fossil Hunting

I'm not going to say the list is endless

but there are a lot of positive "F" words we associate with fossil hunting

and really only one negative "F" word

(and I know I use it too much when I'm digging and not finding).

I'm not going to include the word "fear" in either category

although here is a montage of the alligators I was able to photograph

 on ONE kayak ride back to the boat ramp:

There were at least as many others that dipped under the water before I could snap a photo.

We are aware of them, respect them, and keep our distance and hopefully, they will continue to keep their distance as well.

I'm also not going to include the word "futility" 

which is how the season is shaping up for me.

Here's what I would've sworn was my first whole mammoth tooth:

I'm trying to be a good sport about this Treetop apple juice bottle that I carefully spent 30 minutes digging up but I definitely used that other "F" word when I realized what it was.

Friends

Tom entitled this photo "Ewok Village."

Food

Well, gin is kind of like food.  It fuels my happy post-digging attitude.

I marked that bottle for safety in case someone got a hankering to take a big swig of diet tonic water.

Fun

We all have fun in our own way and sorting fossils is our kind of fun.

Fire

Fire is a definite plus when camping.  It's a great mood elevator and I finally got around to building us a clothes rack so that we can dry our digging clothes at the end of the day.  Makes for a more pleasant morning when we get dressed to get back in the river.

There are many more positive "F" words but I'll finish with the obvious one,

Fossils

We were all shocked when Pam unearthed this coral head.  We've never found anything like it in this area of the Peace River before.  Cool!

I found my largest chunk of mastodon tooth to date.  I found it right next to where Pam found the coral head which was weird because we didn't find much of anything else in that whole area.

Piece of rodent jaw with teeth.  Maybe rabbit.  

I had to make a choice: spend the afternoon trying to ID it through Google, or write my dang post.

A decent selection of scute, giant armadillo on top and glyptodont below but still, that's 3 days of hard digging.  Sigh...

Just a piece of pig jaw but I like finding jaw bone with teeth. 

Gator tooth selection and what I think may be a gator vert.

I really wanted the first tooth to be something special but it's just a very nice horse tooth.

Middle tooth is horse and last tooth is bison.

Garfish scales and another osteoderm that we think are from one of the giant ground sloths.  

Weird that these furry mammals had all this armor plating under their skin.

A selection of turtle and tortoise fossils.

Cute little bone.

And when a season is as bad as mine has been, you gotta post even the fragments of teeth that you find.  This photo includes tapir, horse, bison (I think), camelid, and deer.

So here's a little blurb from Wikipedia about the letter "F".

The origin of 'F' is the Semitic letter vâv (or waw) that represented a sound like /v/ or /w/. Graphically it originally probably depicted either a hook or a club. It may have been based on a comparable Egyptian hieroglyph such as that which represented the word mace(transliterated as ḥ(dj)):

The Phoenician form of the letter was adopted into Greek as a vowel, upsilon (which resembled its descendant 'Y' but was also the ancestor of the Roman letters 'U', 'V', and 'W'); and, with another form, as a consonant, digamma, which indicated the pronunciation /w/, as in Phoenician. Latin 'F,' despite being pronounced differently, is ultimately descended from digamma and closely resembles it in form.

After sound changes eliminated /w/ from spoken Greek, digamma was used only as a numeral. However, the Greek alphabet also gave rise to other alphabets, and some of these retained letters descended from digamma. In the Etruscan alphabet, 'F' probably represented /w/, as in Greek, and the Etruscans formed the digraph 'FH' to represent /f/. (At the time these letters were borrowed, there was no Greek letter that represented /f/: the Greek letter phi 'Φ' then represented an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive /pʰ/, although in Modern Greek it has come to represent /f/.) When the Romans adopted the alphabet, they used 'V' (from Greek upsilon) not only for the vowel /u/, but also for the corresponding semivowel /w/, leaving 'F' available for /f/. And so out of the various vavvariants in the Mediterranean world, the letter F entered the Roman alphabet attached to a sound which its antecedents in Greek and Etruscan did not have. The Roman alphabet forms the basis of the alphabet used today for English and many other languages.

The lowercase 'f' is not related to the visually similar long s, 'ſ' (or medial s). The use of the long s largely died out by the beginning of the 19th century, mostly to prevent confusion with 'f' when using a short mid-bar (see more at: S).

Some Days Are Diamonds...

...some days are stones.

I think that's somewhat redundant 

but the sentiment accurately describes a recent prospecting trip that I made with Miss Vickie.

This was my take for an entire day of hard digging.

The most interesting fossil was a small piece of botryoidal coral which I don't find in the Peace River.

And on this day, I had to really appreciate the smaller things like the subtle beauty of crystallized shells, including a crystalized barnacle.

On a much more exciting note,

I know a fossil superstar!

My fossil friend and fellow club member, Josh Frank, discovered a 7,000 year old swamp burial site while diving off the Florida coast in search of megalodon teeth.

I am going to reprint the National Geographic article by Megan Gannon here on my page but you can  go to the news.nationalgeographic.com site to see some footage of the underwater site as well.  Very exciting fossil news!

7,000-Year-Old Native American Burial Site Found Underwater

By Megan Gannon

PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 28, 2018

Venice is Florida's unofficial capital of fossil hunting. Divers and beachcombers flock to this city on the Gulf Coast, mostly seeking palm-sized teeth of the Megalodon, the enormous shark species that went extinct 2 and half million years ago. In the summer of 2016, a diver searching for those relics picked up a barnacle-crusted jaw from a shallow spot off the shore of Manasota Key. The specimen sat on a paper plate in his kitchen for a couple weeks before he realized it was probably a human bone.

The diver sent a picture to Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research, where it landed in front of Ryan Duggins, the bureau’s underwater archaeology supervisor. A single molar was still attached to the jawbone, and the tooth’s cusps were worn smooth, likely from a diet of tough foods. “That’s something we don’t see in modern populations, so that was a quick indicator we were dealing with a prehistoric individual,” Duggins explains.

With a team of fellow underwater archaeologists, Duggins relocated the dive spot about 300 yards from the shore and 21 feet below the surface. “As soon as we were there it became clear that we were dealing with something new,” Duggins recalls. First, he spotted a broken arm bone on the seabed. Then, when he noticed a cluster of carved wooden stakes and three separate skull fragments in a depression, Duggins realized he might be dealing with a Native American bog burial site—one that had been inundated by sea level rise, but was miraculously preserved.

The discovery was announced today by the Florida Department of State.

During the last ice age, the Floridian peninsula looked more like a stubby thumb than an index finger. But beginning around 14,000 years ago, the global climate began to warm, causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. Florida shrank over the next several millennia, and countless places where prehistoric people once lived, hunted, and buried their dead disappeared beneath the waves.

Marine archaeologists traditionally believed those now-submerged sites would be too fragile and ephemeral to survive the violent thrashing of the sea. “The vast majority of underwater archaeological projects have historically been focused on shipwrecks,” Duggins says. However, in the past couple of decades, some prehistoric sites, mostly scatters of stone tools, have been identified off Florida’s coast. Duggins thinks what he found near Manasota Key proves these underwater landscapes have much more archaeological potential.

In 2017, the team went back to the site to excavate a small test unit. They carefully dug through layers of peat beneath the seabed, sometimes using chopsticks and pastry brushes. They found densely packed organic remains, including more human bones, sharpened wooden stakes and textile fragments. Radiocarbon tests on the wood indicate the site dates to 7,000 years ago, during the Early Archaic period, a time when Florida’s hunter-gatherers were starting to live in permanent villages and adopt a sedentary lifestyle. So far, the researchers have counted a minimum of six individual sets of human remains, but “there’s probably going to be a lot more,” Duggins says, adding that their surveys of the site suggest the whole graveyard could spread across an acre.

yard 

“What we currently are thinking is that when an individual passed, they would have been wrapped in handwoven fibers and sunk to the bottom of the pond,” he explained. “A series of fire-hardened and sharpened stakes would be pounded into the pond bed around the body with the tops of those stakes protruding above the water line.”

Similarly, Duggins thinks the site near Venice would have been a watery graveyard, a small pond in a marsh made up of infilled sinkholes and natural springs, at a time when the site was likely 10 feet above sea level and part of Florida’s mainland.

Michael Faught, an archaeologist who pioneered prehistoric underwater archaeology in Florida, says the Manasota Key Offshore site has “impressive preservation of organic material that are rare terrestrially.”

“These items can help us reconstruct environment, subsistence, and cultural behaviors, and these data can be used to see how behaviors evolved over time, or if there are new immigrants to the area, or both,” Faught adds.

That scientific information hasn’t been gleaned from the human remains and artifacts just yet. The bones are undergoing a slow drying and desalination process at the Forensics Studies Lab run by anthropologist Heather Walsh-Haney at Florida Gulf Coast University. Once the bones enter the collection of Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research, the department will send out a nationwide notice to Native American tribes who may want to claim ancestry of the remains and have them repatriated under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Duggins is already consulting with the Seminole Tribe of Florida on respectful treatment of the remains.

“We are happy to be working, shoulder to shoulder, with the Bureau of Archaeological Research and the residents of Manasota Key to identify a preservation plan that will allow the ancestors to continue to rest peacefully and without human disturbance for the next 7,000 years,” Paul Backhouse, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, said in a statement.

Duggins has also been trying to raise awareness locally with groups like the Manasota Key Association that could help keep watch over the underwater graveyard. In Florida, removing items from an archaeological site without authorization is a misdemeanor; knowingly disturbing an unmarked grave is a felony. Thousands of people visit the nearby beaches and waters, and archaeologists don’t want a site that’s remained largely intact for millennia to be destroyed by mundane activity, like anchor dropping, or worse, looting.

“We only know about it because someone came forward,” Duggins says.

Dark O'Clock in the Morning

Have I bitched about the 3:30 AM alarms lately?

Well, I'm not going to start now.

I know it's something I really want to do if I roll out of bed at 3:30 AM, brew my decaf (yes, you read it right), grab my oatmeal, and head out the door.
I just feel like I've wasted a day if I don't start at sunrise.

I got my decals from Tom pasted onto my kayak.

My gear is seriously looking like it's been used by a road crew.  

Digging is dirty business.  At least it's mitigated this time of year by the heave scent of orange blossoms in the air from the surrounding groves.

Another day grinding away at the bottom of the river with Pam and Vickie.

In addition to a load of broken glass, I also took home this nifty walkie talkie:

I've got it in a jar of rice right now.

It was a good day for surface hunting.

Pam is the surface hunting master but she missed a couple of things.

I found half of these scutes (not counting the broken glyp) by keeping my eyes trained on the ground while I walked around, both in shallow water and on dry land.

I thought this little piece of mastodon enamel was a shark tooth until I picked it up.

I did a lot of digging for a bit of pay dirt.

For some reason, perhaps because I am contrary by nature,

I hate to use the common term "heartbreaker" when referring to a broken fossil.

That would also force me to accept that most of the fossils I find are in the "heartbreaker" category.

This time, however, I have to concede to using the "heartbreaker" label.

I honestly wish I hadn't even found this root of a Florida cave bear tooth.  There is just enough enamel on it to really make me sad.  I couldn't stop dwelling on it for 2 days after I got home.

There is a slight possibility that if I took a 1/4" screen and resifted my dump pile, I would find the top of the tooth but that's not going to happen.  I recently took a 1/4" screen with me to see if I could mend my fossiling ways but after filling it once, I took it back to the kayak and retrieved my trusty 1/2" screen.  The tip of this bear tooth is gone.

And then there was the pathological meg.

Fragment.

I've been seeing several posts on FB of people finding fabulous pathological megs but since I am and will forever be, the megless wonder, I have to be content with this wavy fragment.  

And another piece of what could have been an amazing fossil...

Half of a dire wolf carnassial.

I did score this beautiful camelid tooth:

and another bison incisor:

This location didn't have much in the way of small shark teeth so I had to sift several screens for each little busted up treasure.  

At least I know I put the time in.

Here's a little info on fossil bison in Florida, straight from the pages The Fossil Treasures of Florida sales site.

Bison Latifrons Giant Ice Age Bison

Bison Latifrons is an extinct Bison that had a huge horn span measuring 7 to 8 feet (2.5M) long tip to tip. The Florida fossil vertebrate giant measured 8.5 feet (2.5M) at the shoulder and survived through the last Ice Age.

This Giant Prehistoric Buffalo appeared, in Florida, during the middle Pleistocene period about 500,000 years ago. From the Bovidae Family, of even toed Artiodactyls, these long-horned Bison went extinct 21,000-30,000 years ago. This large wide-horned Bison was the largest of the North American species, of Bison.

The Ice Age Mammal looked similar to modern Bison, but was much larger with a huge set of horns. The males were larger with bigger horns and the females were smaller with more slender horns. All of the Bison were grass grazers.

Another extinct Bison, from the Florida fossil record, was Bison Antiquus. Only the modern Bison Bison remains today.