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As I eluded to in a separate posting, my wife and I recently joined the FPS (Florida Paleontological Society) and joined them for their fall field trip and meeting in the High Springs area of north central Florida. It was a 320 mile drive (one way) but well worth the effort. It also gave us lots of time to listen to a stash of podcasts to pass the time on the long drive. During the field trip to Haile Quarry I found my first Eupatagus antillarum (on my fossil bucket list for a few years) and several other nice smaller echinoids. During the FPS meeting in the evening Jack (Shellseeker) introduced me to Gunther Lobisch who has a passion (and accumulated knowledge base) for echinoids. I mentioned to him about my nascent interest in Florida echinoids. I first learned about Eupatagus antillarum (Florida's long-time "almost" state fossil which is still pending approval) a few years back. Apparently, state legislature also does things on a geological time scale and at the present Florida still does not have a state fossil. I don't remember what led me there but somehow I happened upon a YouTube video of a couple of guys who took kayaks out to the spoil pile islands just west of the small town of Yankeetown along the Gulf Coast of Florida (just north of Crystal River). They were looking for (and found) a number of these fossilized spatangoid (irregular) urchins. That original video is no longer available on YouTube but one of the guys who posted it (and who goes by the handle "Snot Otter") has a newer replacement video showing collecting on the spoil pile islands: I had mentioned to Gunther that it was on my fossil bucket list to one day where to launch some kayaks or a canoe to be able to reach these spoil pile islands in order to go hunting for the echinoids found there. Gunther replied that echinoids could be gathered along the canal itself without having to venture out to the spoil piles. This was all I needed to hatch a plan. We were up in the High Springs/Alachua area and would pass right by Yankeetown on the way home--if you ignore the one hour detour that it would take to head west. My wife was up for the idea so on Sunday (the day after the FPS meeting) we checked out of our hotel and set the car's navigation system at an address nearby where I wanted to go. In a little over an hour we were driving through the little town of Inglis and crossed over the canal itself that runs from Lake Rousseau to the Gulf of Mexico. Along the southern edge of the canal is a small road called the Withlacoochee Bay Trail. There are a few parking areas along the road, an equestrian trail, some paved walking paths, and areas where people had stopped to try their luck with some fishing poles. Along most of the canal length there is a ridge mound made up of the dredging material that was removed from the canal back in the 1930s. In most places this ridge was covered with grasses and trees but we did spot an area where the limestone that made up this ridge was visible along the surface. It was packed hard and weathered and the color was more blackish gray than white due to the mildewy covering. We walked this area for a few minutes and turned up a larger echinoid (still embedded in a coating of limestone but identifiable by shape) and a smaller grape-sized echinoid that had a clean surface but also a few cracks. This was better luck than we had had at the Haile Quarry the day before (or at least quicker finds). We got back in the car and continued down the road. Most of the ridge was covered by grasses with some scattered bushes and trees. In a little while we got to an area where the trees were taller and more dense. It looked like the undergrowth was light limited in these areas and I thought that it might be possible to search under the trees in areas where the soil was eroded away enough to uncover some of the underlying limestone rocks. This was the same sort of areas I looked for while surface hunting the Mazon Creek area for nodules so I wanted to see if my gained knowledge in that environment would cross over to this new area. In just a few minutes of looking around under the trees I spotted a few nice echinoids hiding at the surface. I decided that I needed to return to the car to tell Tammy and to get some bug spray as the mosquitoes were quite dense (and hungry) under the canopy. The flying insect density it seems was not being mitigated enough by the copious number of spider webs stretched between branches. More than once I planted my face directly in a Spinybacked Orbweaver (crab spider) or Golden Orbweaver web--it kinda felt like Halloween haunted house display a week early. -Ken