If I pray for rain, will it stop raining?!

I've spent the last month, hoping against hope,

that it will

STOP RAINING!

The exact opposite has occurred, on an almost daily basis, so I'm now practicing reverse weather psychology:  every day I look forward to a heavy thunderstorm and imagine all the fossils being washed out of the river banks and deposited on the soft sands of the river bottom, waiting for me to come along and gather them up.

This river gage may look encouraging,

until you realize that the river is still about 8 FEET too high.

This summer, the credo appears to be, 

"When you can't go Peace, go Apollo"

I'd been wanting to revisit the spoil islands off Apollo beach since I paddled over there for the first and only time 3 years ago.  Back then, I found part of a beaver tooth and various bone fragments; enough to keep my interest intact.  This would also be a good opportunity to do a test run with the new kayak rack and do some provisioning for the slowly approaching Peace River season.

My first season digging in the Peace River was marred by stabbing muscle cramps in my hamstrings on the 2 hour drive home every week.  This inexpensive electrolyte mix solved the problem.  

But, of course, there is always another problem waiting to rear its annoying head.

Kayak wheels are needed to get from the parking lot to the actual Apollo beach and my wheels SUCK!

Ok, they were free, but sometimes "free" isn't enough to counterbalance "suck" so I made a mental note to secure a new yak trolley before attempting this venture again.

And the weather, too?!

A cold front had rolled through overnight and the morning was cold (by Florida standards, you know, 65ºF) and windy.

The placid nature of this photo belies the gravity of the choppy, haystacking waves I kayaked through.  I kept reassuring myself, "This is nothing. It's SOOO much worse on The Deadliest Catch."

Still...SKETCHY.

For anyone attempting this little jaunt, choose a calm day, wear sturdy dive boots, and try to cross at mid-tide as the channel side of the spoil islands is lined with a series of cement beams that sport patches of sharp barnacles: much easier to cross when submerged by at least a few inches of water, although you can wriggle through if the tide heads out while you're fossil hunting.

The shoreline is a daunting jumble of big broken clam shells and rocks.

Is it worth all the trouble?  

When in desperate need of a fossil fix, yes!

I climbed out of my kayak and almost stepped on this big chunk of mammoth tooth.

Another half hour of surface hunting yielded 2 horse teeth, one with particularly nice color and translucency in the enamel.

I only visited one little island and most of the rocky part of the shoreline was covered 

either by water or mangroves,

but it calmed my hankering to hunt and gather.

National Fossil Day: it's a real thing

I made it to my first National Fossil Day event.

I had a few people giggle when they asked me what my plans were for the weekend and it probably does sound a little odd if fossils aren't your gig, but the event was really enjoyable.  

Seriously, it was.

National Fossil Day is, well, a national event, 

and our special day was held at the South Florida Museum in Bradenton, 

tirelessly organized by my fossil friend and fellow club member, Pam.

Several members of the Fossil Club of Lee County were on hand to assist in manning our club table, including Dean in the above photo with Pam.

I don't know what that thing is in the poster but it's cool as hell!

The museum is small but it was a great space for us,

and has some interesting displays.

I've spent a lot of time considering this painting of a giant ground sloth.  Three tons and 18 feet tall, I'd almost rather see one of them than a t.rex:  equally interesting and probably a lot safer to observe up close.

I've been to a couple of fossil shows

but the emphasis there is on the vendors.

There were definitely things you could buy at NFD, 

for instance, these monochromatic yet appealing minerals.

And there was an arrowhead knapper who was making these amazing pieces of art on site.

If you wanted more information, you could take one of his clever business cards:

The true emphasis of NFD is education and there were 

plenty of highly educated and interesting people to talk to.

This is Dr. Richard Hulbert from the Florida Museum of Natural History.

He is sitting quietly in this photo but was ready and willing to answer anyone's questions.

So much to look at...

And this was the first time I witnessed a truly rabid children's dig.

There were no half-hearted toddlers looking confused by the concept; 

these kids were focused and competitive!

The kids' digs are always seeded with serious fossilers' rejects.  Being relatively new to the hobby, 

I couldn't help but snag a couple of the rejects for myself.

I WISH I had rejects like these!

I capped off the day as a guest of Pam 

at the Florida Paleontological Society's banquet

 where I got to hear Sharon Holte give her very interesting talk about the Thomas Farm dig, http://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/thomasfarm/home/.

Cheers!

Things to do on a rainy afternoon

Last season's fossils have been organized...

...a LONG time ago.

     The rainy season leaves us Peace River addicts in the lurch and I've read plenty of suggestions to help us through the lean times.  I've been organizing and labeling fossils, maintaining and repairing gear, powering through upper body workouts in preparation for getting a shovel in my hands again, etc.  

Here's a few more ideas for the off-season:

Go for a hike.

     Over the years, I've discovered plenty of animal bones while hiking through the woods.  Animal skulls present a great opportunity to ID some of the teeth I've found and their position in the jaw.  Of course, this only applies to non-extinct animals.  The above photo is of a deer skull and a fawn mandible that I found on a recent walk in West Virginia.  On the same trip, I got an unexpected chance to see a juvenile mastodon's upper and lower jaws, not on a hike in the woods but in the entry hall of Thomas Jefferson's house in Montecello, Virginina.  Who knew?!

Visit museums.

     I really just wanted to post this super-cute photo of one of my digging buddies, Pam, and she happens to work at The Shell Factory (https://www.shellfactory.com/) in Fort Myers, Florida where they have an ever-expanding collection of fossils from around the world.

Trade some stuff.

     My ex-sister-in-law (but still my friend) is a geologist.  Sweeet!!!  In exchange for some Apollo Beach sand, she sent me the treasures in the photo above.  The rice-looking fossils are fusulinids from Kansas that died out in the Permian extinction.  At the top of the photo are fragments of crinoid stems and below them are 6 beautiful little brachiopods.

     I realize that not everyone is lucky enough to have a geologist in the family but I suspect it would be fairly easy to find some fossil hunters willing to trade on the internet.  Use a P.O.Box if you're worried about strangers showing up on your doorstep.

     

Pay a little attention to your other collections.

     People with a collector's personality usually have more than one collection going on at any given time.  I like fossils and I also like minerals.   Once again, try to find a geologist in your family.  My care package of fossils from the sister-in-law also included a block of clear halite,  purple-streaked flourite pyramids, and orange-tinged pencil gypsum from a gypsum mine in Michigan.  

     I used my hikes in West Virginia to add a variety of samples of slate and limestone to my collection and even found some pieces with shell impressions.

Get creative.

     I've been using some of my free time this summer to get creative with my SolOpsArt jewelry that I sell on Etsy.  I don't own lapidary tools and I don't really want to get into the field of cutting and polishing stones but I did want to find ways to use some of the beautiful mastodon enamel fragments that I find in the river.  I was able to make this mastodon enamel pendant with my Dremel tool.

The rains are slowing down, the days getting shorter, and soon, I can go back to filling my head with nothing but thoughts of where I'll dig next.

I said I was gonna do it...

I said I was gonna scoop up a bucket of sand

to sift through for tiny fossils.

Someone remind me why I thought this was a good idea!

   I've got the fever and the cure is fossils (not cowbell) but now I know, the cure is normal size fossils.  I went back to Apollo Beach with two 5-gallon buckets (holes in the bottom to let water drain out) and braved a heat index of 106〫F  to collect the sand/shell/fossil mix and take it home.  Better to sift through it for fossils in the AC.  I had also promised a family member who teaches geology in Michigan that I would send her a box of sand as a class project for her students.

     It didn't take long to realize that I wouldn't even be able to lift 5 gallons of sand so I ended up making 2 trips from the truck to the beach and back, collecting a TOTAL of approximately 4 gallons of sand.  Never has the truck looked so far away as it did when I started back with that second bucket.  I was mentally comparing Apollo Beach with Wauchula which had a listed heat index of 113〫F; another good reason fossil season doesn't kick up again until the fall.

I really thought I had enough sand to fill this box to the brim.

    Half of the sand barely filled the flat rate postage box halfway and after it dried out, it only weighed about half what it did (or so it seemed), but I can't wait to find out what young people with young eyes and good microscopes will discover in it.

     My half of the sand yielded 3 more fabulous tiny teeth.

Very cool!  Very small!

Front

Chewing surface and back

Front

Chewing surface and back

I can barely even pick these things up!

I need to dig out the old jeweler's loupe and tweezers I have buried around here somewhere.

Among other things...

I discovered my new favorite shirt

during a summer of activities on Florida's west coast.

Lightweight, SPF 50, quick dry, and check out the mesh inserts along the inside of the arms and down the sides: breezy and cool!  The company is Breath Like a Fish and the shirts run about $40.  I have to save up for a second shirt because digging for fossils is going to wreck this one.

I mailed another SolOpsArt at Etsy.com fossil necklace

to its new home in Pennsylvania

...marking off the days until fall...

         

Mission Apollo

The message on this coffee cup

really encapsulates how I'm feeling at the end of July...

(and not in a cute, sexy way)

     Yes, yes, this Florida summer is just as it should be:  blisteringly hot and punctuated by outbursts of dangerous lightening.  I was reading a post on The Fossil Forum and the originator of the thread invited everyone down to south Florida to dig on land sites with him.  I was tempted...but only for a second.  I imagined myself laid out on the sand like a piece of raw meat in a frying pan, trying to remember, through a haze of heat stroke, exactly what I was supposed to be looking for.

Pass!

     Yet, when I found myself on the Tampa side of the state this weekend, I blew past my Orlando exit and continued down I-75 to Apollo Beach.

I needed some fossils in a bad way!

     A couple of years ago I spent a summer scouring Apollo Beach while I waited for the waters of the Peace River to recede.  Apollo Beach is an ugly, bizarre place but the small strip of easily accessible sand yields some great little fossils, "little" being the operative word.  I've made no secret of my disdain for 1/4" screen when I'm digging in the Peace River; the tiny stuff frustrates me and my search for that big perfect meg (that I still haven't found!).  However, after my recent visit to Apollo Beach, I'm rethinking my feelings about "micro" fossils.

     Look at this tiny incisor; smaller that a squirrel, bigger than a mouse.  Maybe a Pleistocene rat?  It has beautiful sheen and color and I can't wait to buy a magnifying glass so I can actually see it.

And I believe this is the smallest alligator osteoderm ever.

     I'm currently reading Florida's Geological Treasures by Iris Tracy Comfort and she writes, "Because of the ample supply and...ease of collecting and storing, many collectors have...begun to specialize in microscopic material."

     I'm not ready to commit to a microscopic fossil collection (sounds like a migraine in the making) but I can now see the allure of the tiny fossil.  Next time I'm in the area, I'm going to scoop some of the beach "slurry" into a bucket and take it home for closer inspection.

Armadillo scutes, Apollo Beach, Florida

Take stock

It's summer.

That about sums it up.

     Considering the ferocity of the daily thunderstorms we've been having in the Orlando area, I'm surprised that the Peace River gage isn't reading higher, but it's still 3 feet higher than a depth I can dig in.  And, of course, it's wicked hot.  It was around this time last year that I spent a day in Jacksonville avoiding snakes on Quarantine Island and rabid locals on Ponte Vedra Beach.  I'm thinking JAX again but someplace different...

     I've pursued a couple of Jacksonville-based members on The Fossil Forum and one responded with a few coordinates of known fossil locations so I'm going to line up a weekend in August to explore.

     I also remembered that my brother's first wife is a geologist and she used to hunt the Kansas road cuts for cool fossil specimens.  Google brought her up on the first try and I contacted her for the first time in many years.  She is still the same intelligent, kind person I remembered, and she's still a geologist.  Hopefully, I will be able to tag along on one of her student fossil hunts in Kansas sometime soon and she also told me how much she enjoys visits to the Wyoming quarries.  As usual, all I need is money!  It's nice to dream about, though.

     I did some arranging of my fossil cabinet and peaked into the box of Apollo Beach finds for the first time in 2 years.

I forgot I found these awesome little armadillo scutes.

I need to pull everything out of that box and take stock.

     I finally made it down to a fossil club meeting in Ft. Myers and bought 4 more riker boxes with the goal of laying out all the shark teeth that I have deemed to be particularly beautiful.

These are the best of my best.

     I ran out of riker boxes before I got to the lemon shark teeth and I keep megs and makos in my little curio cabinet but it's wonderful to be able to store these gems in a way that makes them so visually accessible.

     If only I didn't have to work!

I need time to explore the rivers to the north and west of me, too.

I need to dig!!!

Close of the regular season

Rain

     All season long I've been keeping tabs on the water level in the Peace River by checking the online gage.  

The message is clear.

The river don't want me no more.

     My last 2 visits were fairly typical for this season:  no fireworks, just basic fossils.  I first went to the area I had been working for over a month of Fridays...

...and found another satisfyingly big chunk of mammoth tooth as well as some impressive dugong/manatee ribs.  Those rib bones add up as they are fairly common in the Peace River.

I started lining my deck railing with them.

I also found another handful of mixed horse teeth and a porpoise tooth.

     The top 2 are "modern" equus, meaning Pleistocene epoch horses before they became extinct in the Americas.  It wasn't until the Spanish started riding roughshod over the new world that horses were reintroduced to our continents.  The bottom 3 "horse" teeth are from ancestors of equus that I had gotten into the habit of calling "3-toed horse", an ancestor of equus, but then I read a lengthy discussion on The Fossil Forum and learned that the modern horse had MANY ancestors and not all of them were 3-toed and even a modern horse can be born with a vestigial toe or two.

     

I studied this chart for about 5 minutes before deciding, in the future, to just say "pre-equus."

     I'm back to thinking I'm done with that location.  I found some great stuff but for the work put into it, I could have been prospecting and potentially found some fabulous stuff.

Case in point:

I made a 5 hour pilgrimage to the fossil club meeting and saw the fruits of another hunter's labors.

I definitely put in the effort but, as I'm often reminded, some of it is luck, too.

     His booty from this location includes a mastodon tooth (on the table in front of the large vertebra), several beautiful 3+" megalodon teeth, and several big makos.  I have yet to find even ONE tooth anywhere near this quality (wiping tears from my cheeks) but I must look on the bright side and acknowledge that this means there's more out there so I will continue my search!

     Meanwhile, back in my sad world...

     I made what could be my last trip to the river this season.  The water was high so I went to an area that is normally dry land and well dug.  A couple of nice gator teeth and...

      ...a couple of nice hemis (with the end of a shotgun shell for scale), but not much else.

My biggest find of the day seemed to sum it all up:

Better luck next season!

     The summer is a good time to regroup: catch up on household projects, create some fossil jewelry for my first fossil show as a vendor, get my back and my mind right with some yoga (can you say, "Ommmm...."?),  and head up to Jacksonville again for some lighthearted shark tooth hunting.

I'll keep you in the loop. :-)