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.