Difficulty to Yield Ratio

When it's harder to get your kayak to and from the river

than it is to dig all day, that's when you know your 

"Difficulty to yield" ratio is

SKEWED!

Unbeknownst to me, the last time we went to this location, Vickie and Pam did a "NEVER AGAIN" pinkie swear.  I, on the other hand, having not been totally skunked, felt a little more exploration was called for.  Once again, I found a few things but not enough to warrant all the effort.

I was happy to find a small sloth tooth:

I managed to find a small busted up meg but it looks so small in my hand:

I had Lilly hold it which made it look a bit bigger:

The best part was another set of very nice glyptodont scutes:

Here's a plate from the small fossil buffet:

Delicacies include shark vertebra, alligator teeth, antler butt, turtle scutes, etc.

It's a tasting menu.

Another good haul of small shark teeth:

The new waders held up well.  They are a little heavier than my last ones and have the built in galoshes so I initially felt like I was in an astronaut suit but once I got used to it, I appreciated the extra protection around my foot.  Much easier for shoveling.  I've only used them once so we'll see...

Here's some more reading info on the ground sloth Glossotherium harlani, direct from Wikipedia:

Glossotherium (literally "Tongue Beast") was a genus of ground sloth.^[1] It was a heavily built animal with a length of about 4 metres (13 ft) snout to tail-tip, a weight estimated at 1002.6 kg (2210.4 lb),^[2] and could potentially assume a slight bipedal stance.

Sloths are grouped into three categories: mylodontids, megalonychids, and megatheriids. Glossotherium belongs to the Mylodontidae, in which it is further subcategorized into the Mylodontinae, characterized both by the loss of the entepicondylar foramen of the distal humerus and anteriorly broad snouts.^[3]

Mylodontinae has five genera: Lestodon, Thinobadistes, Mylodon, Paramylodon, and Glossotherium. The latter three have frequently been confused for each other in scientific literature,^[3] though it is likely Paramylodon and Glossotherium share a more recent common ancestor than with any other mylodontid.^[4]Paramylodon is typically larger than Glossotherium, even though there is overlap in their size ranges, and Glossotherium is generally wider and more robust with a diagnostic increased amount of lateral flare at the predental spout.^[4]

Glossotherium robustum was endemic to South America and weighed about 1500 kg.^[5] Pleistocene records indicate that it was widely distributed between 20⁰S and 40⁰S, with a range spanning across Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay.^[6]

Dentition[edit]

Sloths have an ever-growing adult dentition. They lack deciduous dentition and have a reduction in tooth number. Sloth teeth also lack the enamel and cuspation pattern generally present in other mammals. Their tooth forms are oval, subrectangular, or elongate irregular ovoid with chisel-shaped “caniniform” teeth anteriorly and “molariform” cheek teeth. Glossotherium has a layer of cementum surrounding all molariform cheek teeth with some traces on caniniform teeth. Cheek teeth in Glossotherium are larger, have more complex shapes, and retain more of the cementum layer around all sides of each tooth than the Shasta ground sloth, Nothrotheriops shastensis, and tree sloths.^[3]

Details of Glossotherium’s diet are unclear since no dung deposits are available for analysis. However, based on dental evidence, Glossotherium was likely more suited to grazing, though it was also probably less efficient at ingesting grasses since its dental apparatus was more suited to shearing, which would have been too ineffective at processing plant materials down to an ingestible size to obtain adequate nutritive value. More recent tree sloths have a very slow rate of passage of food through the gut and it is likely that Glossotherium did as well. With a likely low metabolic rate, a large body size, a consequently reduced energy requirement for its weight, and an extraordinarily large gut that likely had a foregut fermentation site, Glossotherium could probably survive better on foods of lower nutritional value than other sloths could. Though it is likely Glossotherium primarily ate grasses, it also probably ate a variety of foliage as well and would be better considered a “browser-grazer” than simply a grazer.^[3]

Hearing[edit]

Glossotherium had large ear ossicles, similar to those in elephants, which imply the loss of hearing acuity of higher frequencies, further implying an advantage for sensing low frequency sounds, infrasound, or bone-conducting seismic waves.^[5] Low frequency sound is useful for long range communication and it is possible that ground sloths used low frequency communication in much the same way that it is utilized by elephants. Sloths may have used low frequency sounds for communication in mating calls or other social interactions, or for long-range sound sensing as in predator-prey interactions or weather forecasting.^[5] Another possible explanation for hearing in low frequencies may be due to fossorial habits: low hearing frequencies coupled with a short interaural distance suggest that Glossotheriumprobably had very poor sound localization. This indicates evidence of an underground lifestyle since loss of high frequency hearing is common to fossorial mammals.^[9] Glossotherium’s huge nostrils were likely effective for sound emission, with expanded nares possibly related to emission of low frequency sounds up to 600 Hz.^[5]

Slow...start...

I can't seem to get it going this season.

The water is still stubbornly high in the Peace River

and I don't have much creek experience.

Plus, the temperature is cold!

I understand that 60ºF in Florida feels much more pleasant than the 9ºF that I just experienced when visiting family in Missouri, but it's still chilly when one is standing in water all day with a shovel.

I had to pull out my waders

to help maintain a functioning core temperature.

It seems like I just paid too much for these waders a year ago but I suppose it's been a bit longer as they are now worn out and no longer water proof.  

My high-end waders very quickly felt like a low-end wetsuit.

Not to mention, they don't have built in boots so I've been wearing them with a pair of thrift store Crocs (which I hate) that are emblazoned with the Indianapolis Colts logo (which I hate) and held onto my feet with bungee cords.  I had Miss Vickie take a photo for me so I can always remember the depths to which I've stooped.

Miss Vickie, meanwhile, has been feeling creative.

She gathered some fun slogans from the internet and made t-shirts for us rock hounds. 

She made this one for Pam although I think it applies more to her,

and this one for me.  I'm thinking of sporting it for the upcoming Fossil Fest.

We rolled our kayaks into position

on our last outing.

I rarely use my kayak trolly and Pam, Don, and Vickie didn't even own kayak trollies so there was a panicked flurry of Amazon orders and air compressors to try and get everything in working order.

The first time is always the hardest but we got it figured out.  Whenever I use my trolly, I remember why I don't use it often.  Muchos problemas...

After all was said and done,

we managed to shift some gravel.

Pam had the most interesting find of a white megalodon tooth.

I didn't find any megs, of course, but I had a good day finding small teeth.

Capybara in the house!

Mishmash here: horse incisor, crystalized scallop, a selection of corals and shell casts, a tiny bird bone, etc.

A sharp little gator tooth, shark tooth in matrix, and a piece of a tapir cap.

Glyptodont material and a tortoise spur.

Antler.

Plenty of turtle.

Ray mouth parts.

A handful of mammoth and mastodon bits.

Nothing fabulous but still, a good day's work.

For your continued reading pleasure, if you so choose, here's some info on hypothermia taken directly from Wikipedia.

Hypothermia is reduced body temperature that happens when a body dissipates more heat than it absorbs. In humans, it is defined as a body core temperature below 35.0 °C (95.0 °F).^[2] Symptoms depend on the temperature.^[2] In mild hypothermia there is shivering and mental confusion.^[2] In moderate hypothermia shivering stops and confusion increases.^[2] In severe hypothermia, there may be paradoxical undressing, in which a person removes his or her clothing, as well as an increased risk of the heart stopping.^[2]

Hypothermia has two main types of causes. It classically occurs from exposure to extreme cold.^[1] It may also occur from any condition that decreases heat production or increases heat loss.^[1] Commonly this includes alcohol intoxication but may also include low blood sugar, anorexia, and advanced age.^[1][2] Body temperature is usually maintained near a constant level of 36.5–37.5 °C (97.7–99.5 °F) through thermoregulation.^[2] Efforts to increase body temperature involve shivering, increased voluntary activity, and putting on warmer clothing.^[2][3] Hypothermia may be diagnosed based on either a person's symptoms in the presence of risk factors or by measuring a person's core temperature.^[2]

The treatment of mild hypothermia involves warm drinks, warm clothing, and physical activity.^[2] In those with moderate hypothermia, heating blankets and warmed intravenous fluids are recommended.^[2] People with moderate or severe hypothermia should be moved gently.^[2] In severe hypothermia, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) or cardiopulmonary bypass may be useful.^[2] In those without a pulse, cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is indicated along with the above measures.^[2] Rewarming is typically continued until a person's temperature is greater than 32 °C (90 °F).^[2] If there is no improvement at this point or the blood potassium level is greater than 12 mmol/liter at any time, resuscitation may be discontinued.^[2]

Hypothermia is the cause of at least 1,500 deaths a year in the United States.^[2] It is more common in older people and males.^[4] One of the lowest documented body temperatures from which someone with accidental hypothermia has survived is 13.0 °C (55.4 °F) in a near-drowning of a 7-year-old girl in Sweden.^[5] Survival after more than six hours of CPR has been described.^[2] For those for whom ECMO or bypass is used, survival is around 50%.^[2] Deaths due to hypothermia have played an important role in many wars.^[1] The term is from Greek ὑπο, ypo, meaning "under", and θερμία, thermía, meaning "heat". The opposite of hypothermia is hyperthermia, an increased body temperature due to failed thermoregulation.^[6][7]

Irma's sandy highway to hell

It seems like it's been so long since I've posted but really it was only about 6 weeks; 

just enough time to get through the holidays and wait for water levels to drop.

I was PSYCHED to get back to my amazing dig site of last season and check out all the new gravel Hurricane Irma had uncovered. 

Imagine the depths of my disappointment and sorrow when I arrived to find

that Irma had paved the entire area flat with sand and not just a little bit of sand.  What was originally a large area of medium to deep holes now looks like a highway freshly paved with sand; so much sand that areas at the current higher water levels that would've been 2' deep are now ABOVE the water's surface and the rest of the place is now about knee deep.  In case I'm not fully expressing my own personal fossiling tragedy,

My fossil paradise is buried under several feet of sand.

I will probably not see this area uncovered again in my fossiling lifetime

and it's wrong to pray for another terrible hurricane. 

...very wrong...

So, back to square one.

Irma did leave several new sandy beaches all along the Peace River so we have more comfortable campsite choices than last season.

We started the season off in the usual manner,

and if I really had created a Molotov Moscato cocktail, it would've been in everyone's best interest.

Temps are sketchy in January but we braved it.

In recent years I've started setting up everything to make coffee right outside the door of my tent so I can stay completely snuggled while brewing a warm beverage.

Even though we had to start from scratch in other areas, we managed to find a few fossils.  It was hard to have so little for 2 days of effort but I kept reminding myself that I've been knocked out of the range of extraordinary fossils and back into normal fossils.

Four glyptodont scutes to add to my haul from last season:

Three giant armadillo scutes:

When we ran them under a black light, we discovered that the algae on the top one fluoresced a brilliant red. 

A sweet little critter canine, maybe raccoon:

Gator teeth:

A couple of decent hemis:

A plate of blah, blah, blah:

And a worn but interesting mystery tooth:

I'll be posting on different forums to see what I can learn.

And here's a beautiful ring a jewelry artist made with a hemi I gave to her:

And for your further reading pleasure, here's a local Fox News report from September talking about what happened to the Peace River after Hurricane Irma.

ARCADIA (FOX 13) - The worst of Hurricane Irma is the flooding in some local communities.

The Peace River is out of its banks in Arcadia. Residents there say they were expecting the Peace River to crest 17.8 feet. But Irma had a surprise for them.

The storm and the flood brought a double whammy at the Peace River Campground.

“The storm kind of scared me more than the flood and then the flood kept coming and coming. And coming," resident Don Boyce said.

Coming up and up, at least a foot more than anyone expected. The river was supposed to crest at 17.8 feet. The gauge broke at 20 and rising.

Kim Gill lives there full-time and her canoe comes in very handy now.

“What's it been like? Wet,” she described. “We have 14 inches in the living room."

The family that owns the park has seen flooding four times previously, but never like this. 

“That much water in my TV room and about a foot and a half in the camper. But we happen to have a motor home so we made it," Summer Lempenau said.

Lempenau’s “Florida Strong” t-shirt will get some more writing.

"I think I'm going to put something on the back, ‘I survived Hurricane Irma and Peace River flood 2017,’” she joked.

The good news is, everyone got out safely when the peace river took over.

“We [will] rebuild, this is my home, I'm not leaving," she said.

The good news is they didn't have the wind damage they did with Charlie, but they'll have to wait for the water to recede to see just how much damage Irma left behind.

Aaaaaalmost there!

It's almost fossil season

but so far

I got nothin'.

Pamela and I made it to the river and worked an area we could reach.

The results...

...were less than stellar

but it was a good digging warmup.

So that's 1/2 of a tapir tooth, 4 tigers, 1 alligator tooth, 3 pieces of turtle shell, a cool chert-type rock at the top, a piece of coral at the bottom, and 2 cylindrical rocks that I have no clue what they are although we found a lot of it where we were digging.

I take a kayak camping trip every year

with a group of non-fossil oriented friends 

and they let me convince them to paddle the north Withlacoochee for 3 days.

I was curious about finding coral that wasn't right by the boat ramp.  I saw a lot of coral but it all looked kind of...gross:  matted with moss and super worn although that doesn't mean there isn't anything cool on the inside.  I limited the hammering, though, as I needed to be able to complete 27 miles of paddling.  A couple of my fellow kayakers

 found souvenir pieces of botryoidal coral so that was fun.

This WAS my new 1-person tent.

I really want to lighten up my camping load

 but the discomfort to weight ratio of this tent did not compute.

Thank goodness I kept the receipt.

This was, however, one of my all time favorite camping spots.  Look at that babbling brook! 

No need to use my white noise app for a sound night's sleep.

I'm used to urban sounds so sometimes it's hard to sleep when it's too quiet.

I was listening to a bit by comedian Anjelah Johnson who said she used an urban sound app that included noises such as quiet police chatter and urban bird (helicopter).

Kinda true...

Here's a piece of fossil coral I found this year and cut on the slab saw.

It was a discard, considered too small and ugly by the serious coral hunters,

but that's the kind of stuff I live for coz, well, it's easy to get to. Sigh...

Just look at those polyps! Va-va-voom!

And the botryoidal ain't half bad either.

So we continue to follow the river level gages.

I console myself by saying that it's easier to get through the holidays without all the fossil distractions.

Right?  Right?!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you for reading and please always leave a comment.

For your continued reading pleasure,

here's an article from Scientific American regarding how often dinosaurs became fossilized.

Paleontologist Gregory M. Erickson of Florida State University explains.

It is often stated in the paleontological literature that the chance an animal will become fossilized is "one in a million." This number is meant to be taken figuratively, the point being that the odds of surviving the rigors of deep time are extremely remote. Nevertheless, all field paleontologists know that the earth is biased when it comes to giving up its dead--the odds of an animal being preserved and consequently exhumed are much greater in some settings than others. 

Studies by taphonomists (paleontologists who study the transition of animals from the biosphere to the lithosphere; taphonomy literally means "burial laws") have shown that organisms that die on land in lush jungle locales are rarely fossilized. In these settings, there is little chance of being buried, scavenging vertebrates and insects are prevalent, bacteria that break down flesh and bones are abundant, and the soils are extremely acidic and tend to dissolve bones. As a result, remains of dinosaurs from such former surroundings are practically nonexistent. Conversely, dinosaurs are commonly found in areas that were once fluvial settings and in regions of extreme aridity. In the former case, it is clear that dinosaur remains were rapidly buried before substantial scavenging could take place. Remains of dinosaurs that were washed into the fluvial systems are found buried in actual river channels, whereas others are found out on the former floodplains at the location where they fell and were covered by sediments from floodwaters that breached river banks. Because river currents tend to scatter and break up bones, remains from river channels are often biased toward certain bones depending on the strength of the current. (Such aggregations are called Voorhies groups after one of the first paleontologists to study the phenomenon by which certain bones, such as ribs and vertebrae, tend to readily tumble downstream, leaving behind only partial skeletons.) Dinosaur fossils found on former floodplains also often show bias toward elements such as pelvises and larger long bones that were difficult for scavenging or predaceous theropod dinosaurs to consume. 

In any event, once bones were entombed in fluvial sediments, not only were they protected from scavengers and many types of bioorganisms, but they could also begin a process known as permineralization. Water percolating through the sands or muds was often rich in silica (natural glass) and other minerals, which could infill the pores of the bones and make them physically resistant to crushing by the overlying sediment. At least some minor replacement of the actual bone matrix usually occurred as well, typically by iron-rich minerals, but it should be noted that most dinosaur bones actually retain much of the original calcium and phosphatic minerals they possessed in life. As such, the phrase "turned to stone"--often used to describe fossil bone--is misleading.

Dinosaurs dying in arid regions also stood a reasonable chance of becoming fossilized. Aridity tends to desiccate a carcass, making it less attractive to scavengers. And unlike jungle or forest settings, deserts have considerably fewer organisms suited for the breakdown of animal tissues. Windblown sands, as well as drifting and collapsing sand dunes, were agents of burial for such animals. Subsequent rainfall during the wet seasons carried minerals into the buried bones. 

If dinosaur remains entombed in the ways described above did not later become metamorphosed (modified by upheavals of the earth) there is a good chance they are still around today, thus enabling the details of their burial to be pondered by taphonomists, either professional or amateur.

Orlando Fossil Show: Hot Fossil Action!

So maybe fossil shows are a niche market,

but they are exciting in their own way.

It's cool to see the amazing fossils people have found and since I was helping out the president of the fossil club I belong to (Fossil Club of Lee County), I got to see all of the behind the scenes socializing, wheeling and dealing.  Fun to watch a gorgeous megalodon tooth flip between 3 owners, the price doubling along the way.  

And everybody was happy!

I spent the morning helping out Louis and Leslie with their booth.  

I was thrilled to get to see them without having to drive 4.5 hours each way.  They were in my neck of the woods this time.

I understand the caution sign,

but it might behoove the owners of this booth to set the $2,800 turtle shell out of the reach of curious fossil shoppers.

There were other fossils on display:

Ok, I know I'm going to burn in hell for being snarky, but seriously, didn't she feel a breeze every time she leaned over to examine a horse tooth?

I thought this type of exhibitionism was a fluke but only a few days later, at a local art fair, I witnessed this:

Maybe it's the festival atmosphere that makes the ladies want to air it out, but I'll have mercy on those around me and keep it in my shorts.  

But, as usual, I digress...

Regular readers (both of you) will remember that I traveled to Keokuk, Iowa

in July to collect some of the namesake geodes.  Super easy to find, which I love, but research told me that cutting them open on a slab saw risked damaging unique crystal formations inside.  The tool for the trick is called a soil pipe cutter and for something that doesn't plug in or have a gasoline motor, it is wicked expensive!  Luckily, my problem-solving man was able to borrow one and set me loose with it.

I am not exaggerating when I tell you it weighs about 60 lbs.

I was popping geodes like bubble wrap!

And I'm glad I did it that way because a few of them had large calcite crystals in the interior.

How cool is that?!

Here's one with small dogtooth calcite crystals:

And here's standard issue botryoidal which isn't that pretty but it was the only one of its kind among my specimens:

Most of them are filled with quartz...SOLID QUARTZ, but about half of those had large vugs lined with the most beautiful crystals:

I've been making it a practice to visit my dad in the midwest every 6 months.  It will probably be too cold to hunt geodes for my January visit but I'll be back there next July.

More fun with coral!

Tom handed me a little black light flashlight and I've been testing everything in the house for fluorescence.

The best results, by far, have been the coral from the Withlacoochee river.

It's kind of hard to photograph but you get the gist.

All of the purple in the photos is a reflection of the black light but the chartreuse outline is part of the coral fluorescing. (Hoping spell check isn't letting me down on these terms!)

I love this little one:

Orange amber in the daylight and funky fluorescence in the black light.

I've found bits of fluorescence in some of my Montana baculites but nothing in the Blue Forest wood from Wyoming, but when you're this beautiful:

You don't need any extra help.

Here's a little Wikipedia info about dogtooth shaped crystals.

<<Dogtooth spar is a speleothem found in limestone caves that consists of very large calcite crystals resembling dogs' teeth (hence the name). They form through mineral precipitation of water-borne calcite. Dogtooth spar crystals are not limited to caves, but can grow in any open space including veins, fractures, and geodes.

These sharp tooth-shaped crystals are generally of the magnitude of centimeters long, but anomalous samples decimeters long exist, notably in Sitting Bull Crystal Caverns. A layer of crystalline calcite can be found underneath the surface of crystal points.

The sharply tooth-shaped crystals typically consist of acute scalenohedrons, twelve triangular crystal faces that ideally form scalene triangles. However, modification of these faces is common, and individual crystal faces may have many more than three edges. Calcite crystallizes in the rhombohedral system, and the most common scalenohedron form has the Miller index.

Spar is a general term for transparent to translucent, generally light-colored and vitreous crystalline minerals.>>