Search the Community

I had a great half day at the North Sulphur River Texas before the rain got me. I found a mix of everything to include artifacts, Xiphactinus vert, swordfish tooth, coprolite, turtle shell, partially rooted mosasaur tooth, killer mosasaur paddle bone, Enchodus jaws, shark teeth and old toys. My buddy racked up on mosasaur verts.

After taking a little time off from hunting due to a new job and holidays I decided to hit the North Sulphur River with a friend. We had a great day. I love the Tylosaur scapula with shark bites. We found a large Xiphactinus washing out and ended up with one left maxilla and three verts from it. We will go back and check that area again.

I'm a newbie who lives in the Austin area with a lot of passion for ancient life, but I'm having trouble making a decisive start with with my searches. I have a particular interest in large western interior seaway predators, most notably xiphactinus, but also the mosasaurs and sharks that lived in the area as well. Finding a vertebrae, of perhaps even teeth from these groups would be absolutely wonderful, but of the few creeks in the Austin area I've scouted, I've been able to turn up nothing besides gastropods. This is still despite heavily studying the sometimes confusing Texas geological maps So with this in mind, how and where do I start? Are there any places in the Austin area where I may have some luck in discovering possible vertebrae or teeth? I'd love any advice, I'm eager to make a start but I'm quite alone and need a little bit of guidance. Thanks!

Earlier this year I bought this case from IKEA for about $60. Then I added some LED lights and a few nice fossils. Check it out: Top row is basically the "ferocious fish" level Next down is the Tylosaurus / platycarpine mosasaur level Then the Cretoxyrhina level And a Pteranodon wing cast I made Overview of the four layers: Top level: Xiphactinus and Protosphraena. Note embedded tooth on r. Xip vertebra.

For the rank amateurs here is it possible to explain the differences and how to identify these teeth? Of lesser importance I am attaching photos of 3 inch to inch and a half teeth I had previously thought were all Enchodus and then 2 small half inch fragments found yesterday, both heavily striated. As always thank you all

I decided to take a break in picking through the matrix from my last trip and actually get out and hunt this morning. I drove over to Hill County, and tried out a new creek. I really didn't find anything worth mentioning there, left and stopped on the way home at the creek where I'd found so much mud three weeks ago. It was much drier this time, and I had a lot easier time navigating it. But I still didn't find many fossils. Just like last time though, it produced one that made the trip really worthwhile. Does anyone know what this fish tail belonged to? A Xiphactinus, maybe?

Fossil of giant 70 million year-old fish found in Argentina (PhysOrg) De Pasqua, J.J., Agnolin, F.L. and Bogan, S., 2020. First record of the ichthyodectiform fish Xiphactinus (Teleostei) from Patagonia, Argentina. Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, pp.1-5. (Researchgate PDF) Yours, Paul H.

Two hunts, two creeks, two legendary finds in one week. I don’t know what you know about Texas weather, but in July it’s hot. Downright miserable, unsafe heat at times. Just a week and a half ago we hit a heat index of 111 degrees. So when you have a day that tops out in the mid 90s for a high, you take advantage of that cool front. I checked the weather and saw that Tuesday had a high of only 94. I messaged my buddy @sharko69 and said, “Hey, its gonna be a nice day. Let’s do some hunting this afternoon after work.” So we meet up at our usual hunting spot and he shows me a new drop in that I had yet to explore. So we drop in and right away I spot a Ptychodus whipplei tooth coming out of the wall. Woohoo! I’m on the board! Not a bad start. So we head upstream walking through knee high water, boots sinking in the silt, and the occasional game of limbo as we climbed under fallen trees. All the while taking great caution. On his scouting trip to this spot my friend saw a slide mark on the muddy bank. Was it crocodile or beaver? A crocodile in a creek in north Texas would be highly unusual, so we hedged our bets on the laws of probability. After all, fortune favors the brave right? Still I did desire to return home to my family that night, so we were on high alert. Then we arrived at our destination; the place looked almost heavenly. An enormous gravel bar stood before us, we knew it had to contain something wonderful, but would we find it? Fast forward to an hour later, the only thing I’ve found since my Ptychodus are mosquitoes. Oh and the breeze stopped, so now it’s hot-ish, humid, and still. But I’m focused and press on despite feeling like I’m in an oven. After a while I found another shark tooth. Squalicorax, one of my favorites. Nice. My friend and I are chatting and he walks over to show me his find, a nice Cretalamna tooth. As he leaves I scoot over to continue my search and right behind his steps lay a sight unlike any other. A black, deeply striated, and large tooth. I jump up speechless and throw my hands on my head. I turned away and had to do a double take. Surely I can’t have seen what I just saw. Yup, I did. A beautiful Pliosaur tooth was waiting right there atop the gravel pile. My friend sees my silent commotion and bolts over. He starts yelling, jumping up and down, and freaking out, just like I am on the inside. I gently pull it out and it’s in wonderful shape and it even has some of the root still attached. To put this in perspective finding a Pliosaur fossil here is insanely rare. While I don’t know the exact number I can virtually guarantee that the number of Pliosaur teeth found here in north Texas in the last decade is in the single digits. My friend found one just two weeks prior in the same creek and back then I thought I had seen the only Pliosaur tooth I would ever see. Boy was I glad to be so wrong. The rest of the hunt after that is somewhat of a blur. I found a few more shark teeth, a tennis ball sized piece of coprolite, oh and a smile that I’ll have to have surgically removed from my face. Fast forward a few days to Friday night. My friends sends me a picture of a monster 2-1/4" shark tooth he found from a new creek earlier that day. Wanna join me early tomorrow morning to hit up the spot some more? Pssh, does a fat puppy hate fast cars? Of course I do! So the alarm goes off at 6 am and I successfully beat the sun out of bed for today's hunt. After a cup of joe I hop into the car and begin the trek. We meet up in an empty parking lot, it looks like we're spies out for a super secret rendezvous or up to some type of nefarious behavior. But the only nefarious behavior that was happening that day was.... well actually none at all. Just a nice fossil hunt, social distancing style. We drop into the site and get to work. Unlike last time where I found something immediately we were held to a big fat goose egg for quite a while. A solid hour or more. "Boy I'm not finding anything." "Yeah me neither." 30 seconds later i hear behind me, "Oh heck yeah!" I turn around to see my buddy holding a nice segment of Mosasaur jaw. Missing the tooth sadly, but a heck of a find nonetheless. Well, it's good to know that they're out here, but I just can't believe they're all scurrying away once I get close to them. So I continue to search. Fun fact about my buddy @sharko69. He is a master Ptychodus hunter. He's so gifted in fact, that I have accused him of selling his soul to the devil. And that in return he was given the power that whenever he walks by a Ptychodus tooth, it just hops up into his pocket. The verdict is still out on that accusation. So he tells me, "I have yet to find a Ptychodus yet here." So they must not be here, it's the only logical explanation given his power. So imagine my surprise when I looked down and saw a gorgeous Ptychodus latissimus tooth. I'm not getting shutout today! Whoop whoop! We press on and for another 30 minutes, nothing more is found except for a ton of broken and busted up septarian nodules. These dirty rotten tricksters are littered all over the creek. They constantly tempt us into thinking they're something cool, only to be let down yet again. I look down towards the water and see what looks like another septarian nodule. "Not fooling me this time" I say to myself. I look away, but as I do I instantly stop and look back. Something seemed odd about that one. I approach it and I freeze. I say out loud to my buddy who's standing next to me but facing the other way, "There's no way this is what I think it is." He turns around and shouts out, "YES IT IS!" I reach down and pull it out. What I hold in my shaking hands is a stack of associated Xiphactinus vertebrae. 2 complete vertebrae, half of a third, and a tiny piece of a fourth. They're resting nicely in a perfectly flat piece of matrix, almost as if mother nature herself carved it out for a perfect display base. The rest of the trip continued uneventfully for me for another couple hours. Yielding to me "only" an additional Squalicorax tooth. On the way back my friend pulls out yet another 2-1/4" tooth. His fifth tooth near or above the 2 inch mark in a week. (I meanwhile have yet to join the 2" club, but it's something I'm working on). At least with this find I can confirm that he is not bringing them from home and planting them and is indeed finding them. So that capped off a week in which I found two legendary once in a lifetime finds. It was a fun week filled with mild-ish weather, fun times spent with the Prince of Ptychodus, and brilliant one of a kind fossils. But I think the greatest treasure of all, was that of the deeply forged bond of friendship through the medium of fossicking. TLDR; Found two cool fossils.

I had a great day on the North Sulphur River.

Long nine hour freezing hike in Northeast Texas. The partial mastodon tooth and tylosaur jaw section with replacement tooth were the highlights of my day. I dated the old soda bottle to the 1950's. The artifacts were a nice bonus.

Hello I found these two in some loose soil from a creek wall that has recently eroded. Each vertebra was found around 7 ft from one another. Found in Central Texas (Travis county)

Here's a few Xiphactinus fossils in my collection that I collected at the North Sulphur River Texas. My arm for scale lol.

My man cave is coming along nicely. Most are personal finds from Northeast Texas. A few were gifts or purchases.