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Yesterday i decided to take a recon mission up Gordons Creek. Its an amzing hike I'll start with. 8-10 miles in and out to the point it started getting really good. Lots and i mean LOTS of dugong bones littered on the bank from previous digs. There is no shortage of present day dinos on the creek either lol. There are several spots with heavy heavy gravel in a couple of the first bends. My finds are actually at my girlfriends house as of rn. I did however find what appears to be a chicken leg bone im thinking its not lol. I'll add pics later tonight. Heading out tomorrow to the Peace, what i refer to as "the claw" now lol. Have an awesome day y'all.

My wife Tammy and I made it out for one last trip to the Peace River for this season. I expect I'll be busy and won't have a chance to get back to the river before the summer rains usher in another rainy season with raging river levels depositing a new layer of gravel (and erasing any of the pot holes and spoil piles that us fossil hunters have worked so hard at this season--like shaking a giant Etch a Sketch). We experimented with a 1/2" mesh retrofit on one of our sifting screens since John (Sasha) and Jeff (jcbshark) have used them to great end. The spot we focused on in the Peace River was an area of large chunky gravel with bowling ball size boulders of matrix mixed in. This gravel bed has never turned up much in the way of smaller finds or tiny shark teeth so we figured we'd not be missing much with the wider screen mesh. As Jeff had commented on, you sure can shovel a lot of material through the wider mesh before filling a screen. I went from an average of 3 shovels full per screen (with the 1/4" mesh) to 6-10 shovels with the more coarse mesh. As there is a lot less tiny gravel to sort through in the sifter it takes very little time to parse through what the screen has kept from passing through. It was definitely a quick way to zip through a large amount of gravel. The very first screen produced a nice Equus lower molar which was a nice way to start the day. Though this site has produced some interesting finds in the past (a couple of 3 lb. mammoth tooth chunks, large makos, glyptodont rosettes, and even a gold wedding ring and tie tack--there must be a story there) this trip didn't produce much in the way of "wow" moments. The water was over 2' lower than when we tried this site just two weeks ago so it was much easier to dig and even visually locate the chunky gravel areas. Since I'd found large chunks of mammoth tooth there in the past it seemed necessary to reach down and inspect every large chunk that wouldn't balance on the shovel on its way to the sifter. Sadly we only had large chunks of matrix and no heart-stopping moment when a large, intact mammoth tooth reveals itself from the tannic waters--maybe next season. Though we hunted alone this weekend without the company of any of the South Florida TFF members, we did have a companion of sorts. While standing in waist deep water about 20' from the shore where our canoe was parked I looked out while chucking larger pieces of matrix away from our digging area. Just after a shoebox size chunk of rock had left my hands I noticed it was heading in the vicinity of a young gator which had come to the surface for air (and likely to see what all the commotion was about). Though the rock created a great depth charge of a splash not 3 feet from the gator's head it didn't spook but simply slowly descended back into the tea colored water. Had this been a 13' adult I'd have given it as wide a berth as possible as I cautiously slinked back to my canoe but as this was a juvenile probably less than 4' I chose to keep my eye on him (or her?) while we continued to dig and sift. We continued to volley shots in the general direction in an effort to make our nearby surroundings a less appealing for this living fossil. Undaunted, Al (as we took to calling him) stayed with us for several hours periodically surfacing near the shore for a breath of air and to keep an eye on his unruly new neighbors. Luckily, the only gator tooth I encountered was a black one that surfaced in my sifting screen. We've seen gators occasionally on the Peace but this is the only time we've been within 10' of one while in the water. We dug through a lot of the coarse gravel but it didn't deliver much other than dugong rib bones. They are exceedingly common at this site with every shovel full of material bringing up 2-3 fragments. I wondered if it was possible to dig a shovel full of gravel and not turn up at least one dugong frag and I think the only time I did was when I ventured off the gravel deposit into more sandy areas. We found a few whale (dolphin) ear bones (tympanic bullas) though most were pretty beat-up and fragmented. I had to laugh when I got 3 of these in a single screen of gravel--we ended up with 9 in total. There was a lot of small fragments of mammoth and mastodon (or gomphothere) teeth and even few small pieces of tusk ivory that ended up in our sifting screen but the largest piece of what might be proboscidean was a large rib? fragment. It's a bit big and not the right shape for dugong and besides it has a decidedly apparent marrow space. We had a nicely complete fish (shark?) vert that was just a little too big to fall through the sifting screen and so came home with us. The other vert we found was not fossilized but recent and I assumed might be gator (though I have to look through other possibilities like deer or pig as well). We were hoping for some nice glyptodont rosettes but they eluded us this time. Instead we had several armor plates from Holmesina (mostly broken pieces but one complete and in nice shape). In addition to many frags we ended up with three nice horse lower molars including the smallest one we've ever found (just over 1/2" across). I'll have to consult some books to see if this is just a juvenile Equus or a smaller species (I suspect the former). A couple of bison molar frags rounded out the mammal teeth for the trip. Turtle shell was relatively absent this time with only a few nuchal plates from the carapace and another "peace sign" gular-humeral plate from the plastron. The nearly 2" long leg spur (osteoderm) from a large land tortoise was the trip maker for me (I'm oddly quite fond of these things). Though we had dozens of meg frags (mostly nearly unidentifiable root fragments) we did find a real shamer--what would have been about a 3.5" meg split right down the center. Rather than caulk it to a hand mirror to make it "complete" this one will end up in my next goodie bag to be gifted to some unsuspecting friend's kid. The only complete meg we found was a little 2" one that oddly didn't come from the site with coarse gravel but from an area with finer gravel. After our allotted time searching for big finds at the coarse gravel site we continued down river to an area that I know has a great abundance of fine (pea-size) gravel. in the past we've found areas of this gravel bed where 3 shovels into a sifter have revealed up to 2 dozen smaller shark teeth--great fun when you have a group of friends with kids. We had a competition to see who could get the most teeth in a screen and I think the winner was something like 25 or 26. I wanted to stop at this location (coded FINE) in my handheld GPS because I figured this would be a good place to harvest some micro matrix. After seeing all of the fun that various TFF members have had picking though the fine gravel that Jeff (jcbshark) and John (Sasha) had collected I though it might be interesting to cache some of this material to play with during the off season (when the river it too high to hunt). I brought along one of my 1/4" sifters and had a piece of window screen material (roughly 1/16" openings) to set inside my new 1/2" mesh sifting screen. By double stacking the two screens I could sort out some micro matrix. The 1/4" mesh on top kept out any larger gravel while the 1/16" mesh fitted into the bottom sifter let the sand and tiny gravel pass through. This left micro matrix with a grain size roughly 1/16" to 1/4" in diameter sitting in the lower sifter. My wife took a turn with the shovel loading up the stacked screens and she hunted for any tiny teeth trapped by the upper sifter while I worked the finer gravel in the bottom screen till the sand had made it through the fine mesh. I brought along a 5 gallon bucket to dump the micro matrix into and soon had the bucket nearly filled. You can imagine that this bucket ended up rather heavy and I got the brainy idea to put the sifting screen on top of the bucket and invert it on the sandy shore so the trapped water could drain away reducing what weight I could. After it had drained well I flipped the bucket upright and scooped back into the bucket the gravel that had spilled out into the sifter. While doing this the bucket regained most of its weight and unfortunately the sandy sloped shoreline where I was working gave way as the titled bucket approached full fill tipping a good portion of its contents back into the water at the edge of the shore. After some choice words I re-scooped a combination of micro matrix, sand, and water back into the bucket and loaded it into the canoe. I'd deal with cleaning-up the matrix at home. The matrix is now spread out on a plastic tarp sunning in my driveway. Once it is quite dry I figure it will sift more easily. I'll give it another pass or to over some more window screen mesh and then store it in a dry place to play with later. I'll be bringing some samples of this mesh to Chicago next week when I head up there to do a little more fossil hunting north of the Mason-Dixon line. Though I didn't collect as much micro matrix as I had intended (next time remember to take more buckets) I may make some more care packs of Peace River micro matrix available on the Forum if there is still interest. Cheers. -Ken