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Last Friday, I went to the hillside I normally hunt and found this: Auspex and Dan were both kind enough to identify it as a rostrum (my first), possibly from either Protosphyraena or Saurodon. I happened to find this in a gully just as I was leaving so I didn't have time to poke around the area. Being located in one of the gullies, I kind of assumed it might just be from wash and might have come from further up the hill. Yesterday, I went back to the same spot and searched up-hill from where I found the rostrum, assuming it may have washed down the gully, but to no avail. I went back to the same spot that I found the rostrum and started digging just a little and came up with this: After some clean-up and reassembly:

I spent part of today on my normal hillside just exploring around. I was picking up the normal shark teeth, fish verts, crab claws, etc, when I came across this: This find is much larger than the normal material I find on this hillside. It measures approximately 100mm long and approximately 20mm diameter on the large end. To me, it appears to possibly be some type of rib tip, as I see no signs of enamel. But if it's a rib tip, I'm having a hard time believing an animal this large when compared to the normal things I find.

Yesterday I spent the day exploring some new possible sites. As usual, mostly I ran into fences and "No Trespassing" signs. I found a couple of sites, but nothing noteworthy. Since we had gotten some pretty good rain during the week (from the same storm system than spawned 13 tornados in the area including the EF-4 that hit Granbury and the mile-wide EF-3 that hit Cleburne), I decided to visit my hillside again to see what the rains might have exposed. It was a pretty typical day on my hillside: One of the things I normally do is if I find any "associated material", I usually note the location of the find and check the location again after we've gotten some rains. Usually, there's nothing new to find. However, sometimes I get lucky and find additional material. Here's an example of an "associated material" find I made in October, 2011: Since that original find, I've found the following in the same location after several rains: Here's another example of "associated material" find that I made in November, 2012. This was later identified as an Aspidorhynchid jaw fragment: I have continued to check this location as well after rains. I have found a few more small sections of the jaw, but today, I found a partial vert that was approximately 18 inches from the location I found the original jaw section. Because of the proximity, I "assume" this vert will be associated with the jaw section.

I got off from work this morning and it was obvious that it was going to be another beautiful day in Texas, so I thought what better way to spend a couple of hours than searching a part of my hillside that I don't get to very often? I didn't find anything spectacular, but did manage a nice shark vert, some shark teeth and a small piece of fish jaw. The piece of fish jaw had an interesting pattern on the bottom of it. The squali tooth still has the serrations on it. I even managed to flush up a wild turkey that was hiding in some tall grass during my outing. Good times!

I got to spend just about 30 minutes on my hillside today on my way home from work. I found my second Goniophorus. It's not in the best of shape but the coloring was intesting as it came from one of the "red/purple" outcropping areas. I also found a fish tooth similar to one that danwoehr found during his visit (maybe he'll include it in his November report). This one has an oyster that attached to it. EDIT: Added different pics of tooth...better lighting today.