Last camping trip on planet Crematoria

It was a beautiful weekend on the Peace River

if you like being swarmed by no-see-ums, flies, and mosquitoes

while sweating in +90º temps.

I do NOT.

But I've had next to no digging time this season and I wanted to close out a site that's been so good to us for over 2 years. We might've spent 2 more seasons here but Hurricane Irma put an end to that.

The first thing I wanted to see on this trip

was whether or not the sapling clothes rack I made last year had survived the summer floods. Amazingly, one side was still standing and the cross bar was still threaded through some tree branches where I'd left it.

Still good for drying a couple of items.

I always get a little sentimental when I close out a productive digging site

because I've spent hundreds of hours there, absorbing everything about the scenery, the water, the invisible terrain of the river bottom.

It also means I'll have to start prospecting again.

Insert frowny face here.

All good things come to an end...

It wasn't a total wash; we found a few odds and ends.

Glyptodont Heaven is no more.

I really, REALLY thought I would find one more glyptodont scute but only this fragment turned up in my screen after 2 days of digging. One excellent giant armadillo scute was probably my best find for all of the effort.

I like my little green Canada Dry bottle. It was a nice break from the constant parade of Bud Light bottles that we dig up.  I also found an old Tab can. I knocked back of lot of those in my teens.

This is a piece of ear bone but I have no idea from what animal. I like the delicate little channels found in fossilized ear bones.  This one is good enough to find a new home in the Ear Bone Jar.

Yes, I have an ear bone jar. Only vaguely creepy.

Small sharks teeth. 

Small numbers of small sharks teeth.

Little goodies including a sea urchin spine, "swollen fish vertebra" (whatever that means), alligator tooth, sloth osteoderm, garfish scale, fish jawbone, and snake vertebra.

A piece of fossilized wood.

And lots of turtle.

Always lots of turtle.

Goodbye, dear sweet primitive campsite, goodbye glyptodont heaven, and goodbye to the Snag

where we found everything from the remains of a wrecked boat to the teeth from giant ground sloths and dire wolves.  On to the next great thing!

And for your further reading pleasure, here's some information about fish jaws straight from Wikipedia:

Most bony fishes have two sets of jaws made mainly of bone. The primary oral jaws open and close the mouth, and a second set of pharyngeal jaws are positioned at the back of the throat. The oral jaws are used to capture and manipulate prey by biting and crushing. The pharyngeal jaws, so-called because they are positioned within the pharynx, are used to further process the food and move it from the mouth to the stomach.

Cartilaginous fishes, such as sharks and rays, have one set of oral jaws made mainly of cartilage. They do not have pharyngeal jaws. Generally jaws are articulated and oppose vertically, comprising an upper jaw and a lower jaw and can bear numerous ordered teeth. Cartilaginous fishes grow multiple sets (polyphyodont) and replace teeth as they wear by moving new teeth laterally from the medial jaw surface in a conveyor-belt fashion. Teeth are replaced multiple times also in most bony fishes, but unlike cartilaginous fishes, the new tooth erupts only after the old one has fallen out.

Jaws probably originated in the pharyngeal arches supporting the gills of jawless fish. The earliest jaws appeared in now extinct placoderms and spiny sharks during the Silurian, about 430 million years ago. The original selective advantage offered by the jaw was probably not related to feeding, but to increased respiration efficiency—the jaws were used in the buccal pump to pump water across the gills. The familiar use of jaws for feeding would then have developed as a secondary function before becoming the primary function in many vertebrates. All vertebrate jaws, including the human jaw, evolved from early fish jaws. The appearance of the early vertebrate jaw has been described as "perhaps the most profound and radical evolutionary step in the vertebrate history". Fish without jaws had more difficulty surviving than fish with jaws, and most jawless fish became extinct.

Jaws use linkage mechanisms. These linkages can be especially common and complex in the head of bony fishes, such as wrasses, which have evolved many specialized feeding mechanisms. Especially advanced are the linkage mechanisms of jaw protrusion. For suction feeding a system of linked four-bar linkages is responsible for the coordinated opening of the mouth and the three-dimensional expansion of the buccal cavity. Other linkages are responsible for protrusion of the premaxilla.