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I had been wanting to put this up with all of the pictures etc. on TFF, but I have been running so fast and am so busy that given that it is almost two weeks ago and I still haven't gotten time to post this I will just give the link: http://www.bluffcountryfossils.net/blog/what-an-amazing-group-hunt-may-14-2016/ Appears that a whole trilobite was found! And hey Guys and Gals, this was all possible due to TFF members support and sharing! Hooray to TFF!

I am putting this here because over the last couple of years TFF members have wholeheartedly supported me trying to bring the joy of fossil hunting to children and families. Lots of your ideas have come to fruition! Since teaching, kids and fossil hunting are recurring themes on TFF, which is an international forum, I thought this might help someone else, somewhere. :-) This post has lots of pictures (blogs come and go but TFF doesn't so this makes sense to me and it is looking like I'm going to have to resize every picture), so just please be patient - I will put "continued" at the bottom when going to a reply. No patience? Just jump over to my fossil adventure blog and read the whole thing without having to go to multiple replies. :-) Family Fun Fossil Hunt – River Roots Skills School Parking in the horse pasture. [i had to create infrastructure for parking. That meant pulling a post and RR tie and buying a new gate. Before a tour I have to mow the pasture and drag it to break up manure.] This tour was organized through the Eagle Bluff Environmental Center’s River Roots Skills School (http://www.riverrootsschool.org/) as part of their ecotourism initiative. We got together on August 8th, 2015. People came early and stayed late. The class was scheduled for 1-5 p.m. and the last people left around 7 p.m. It was a WONDERFUL class! I wish people could have stayed and we would have had a campfire and talked fossils into the evening! But I am hoping that several come back and we can hunt together again. Fossil Barn Every tour I give is personalized to the people who come – I don’t do canned tours. I had prepared more of a university level fossil information and hunt. This was a family tour! I would say at least half were kids under 14 years old. RRSS had not informed me that there would be children, but any good guide accommodates and they all got to choose dinosaur bones that Old Dead Things had brought me from Montana and Wyoming, Eocene shark and ray teeth donated by another Fossil Forum member, and one little guy got his fluorescent shark’s tooth wrapped in copper wire to wear around his neck. And, of course, there was the fossil sandbox, but these kids weren’t too interested in that as they knew we were going to go hunt fossils “on the rocks”. Fossilized dinosaur bone on “Dino Island”. Fossil sandbox. Sand from the St. Peter Formation, Ordovician fossils and a mineral section. We started out with introductions, so I could determine the experience level of the individuals. And of course where the facilities were: Continued...