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Maybe some of you remember way back a few years ago when I started reporting on my adventures in the ditch at the side of the road in the Upper Danube Valley. At that time I was excavating the Kimmeridgian divisum zone, but after a couple of years the digs got so close to the cliffs that it was time to leave it in peace. Since then I've been digging in the hypselocylum zone, which is deeper and far enough away from the cliff to be completely safe to work. There is however still one safe spot in the divisum zone that I keep walking past and thinking that I should have a go at it someday, but it's covered with such a large amount of overburden that I can't be bothered. Up until now. I've managed over the last couple of years to recover most of the available species from the hypselocylum zone, with the exception of a couple of extremely rare ones, and that's the main reason I keep on digging there. But I just needed a change today, so I thought I'd finally try my luck at that safe spot. We'd had quite a bit of rain over the past week, so I ended up using a lot of the overburden to build a dam and sluices in order to drain away the water which had accumulated directly at the place I wanted to dig. This took at least an hour, but it did the job, and I could get down to it. Here are a couple of shots I took after I'd spent a few more hours working at the exposure. As you can see, it was quite a muddy matter Thank goodness my wife does the laundry without complaint. It turned out to be well worth the effort. Here are my finds of the day. Now I can hardly wait to get to work on them, particularly that one at the top. I'll keep you posted on that.