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After hearing much excitement about Rowan University's Fossil Park in New Jersey, I finally managed to procure tickets to their once-a-year community-access dig. The park is from the bottom of the Cretaceous sea and is suspected to contain evidence of the big meteor event. They've found whole croc skeletons, beautiful full sea turtle shells, petrified wood and other beauties in this 8-acre pit. Shark teeth, shell steinkerns, and vivianite crystals are common finds. There were 1,500 tickets available for today. They sold out in 30 minutes a month ago. Wow! I have been eagerly awaiting my time in the pit ever since! We made sure to get tickets for the earliest of three sessions so we got the first crack at whatever was to be found. No lazy morning for us! We got on the shuttle bus and the volunteer asked if we were all ready for the "trip of a lifetime." Everyone cheered. She said that "almost everyone" will find something if they look hard. Hmmm. The tickets are timed. You can pay $7 per person for a 2-hour time slot or $140 per family for the whole day. We chose the 2-hour slot because two hours seemed like plenty of time. Well, it definitely wasn't. The session was from 8:30 to 10:30, but that included travel on the shuttle bus to the site, 20 minutes to get off the bus, look at the display tent and a couple vendors, and line up with 500 other people so everyone could walk in at once. We listened to a talk about the pit as a 500-person group, and finally got to dig at 9:30. We dug for 45 minutes, then spent the last 15 minutes shuffling most of those 500 people back out of the pit. I mentioned that the pit itself was 8 acres of amazing. The visitors today only had access to maybe an acre. 500 people + 1 acre of ground= stepping on each other. Not good. We also were not allowed to dig on the floor of the pit within our fenced area because it might contain something they want to dig out professionally. Fair enough, but 500 people on 3 small spoils piles and a big puddle? Hey, I spent that 45 minutes digging with my plastic toy shovel (no metal tools allowed) in one tiny spot with no reason to move anyway, at least until I hit an ant colony. My teenage daughter dug a foot away and we chatted with a guy next to us from Boston who had come down for the day. See that little black area on the right, surrounded by orange fence? That's where 500 people dug in each of three sessions. What did we find? Not much. Generally on our digs, my daughter finds teeth and I find shells or bones. Doesn't matter what we are looking for, that's what we find. Today was no different. I found one 1/2" partial brachiopod of a genus with which I am unfamilar and a couple of small vivianite crystals. My daughter found a 1/4" partial tooth from what was probably a fish. The volunteers weren't great at IDs beyond the common stuff and the three PhDs onsite were a bit busy for those 45 minutes, so we may never know. As we got back on the bus, a volunteer cheerfully complimented us on how dirty we were. *sigh*