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HI all, Well, we finally got through the last batch of scrapings from the sides of the giant ant hills up east of Show Low in the Cretaceous Twowells Tongue of the Dakota formation. About 2 gallons worth of gravels were gone through, pinch by pinch and the finally tally of micro fossils can now be fully evaluated! In this last posting on this subject, Ill show a few microscope shots at 10x of some of the left over categories of what we pulled out of the tiny gravels brought to the surface by huge red fire ants. Only a few tiny sideritized gastropods were found. They are truly treasures. They are internal casts in the iron mineral siderite, and show a minor fauna in the underlying cretaceous limestones beneath the surface of the hill we were on. Here is a shot of the gastropods. Next, we have sideritized worm burrows. Many segments of these were found, and some of them had pointed ends. And while we spent many hours picking through the gravels with a 5x optivisor in a black gold pan, to alleviate boredom we often pulled out anything else that was interesting, like these awesome clear quartz gravels: Finally, a big surprise - half a dozen extant LAND SNAILS that were ultra tiny showed up in the fines. We did not expect these! Well, thats it for now. Until we get back to that area and find more fossiliferous ant hills where our insect worker fossil friends have pulled out more micro fossils for us, we bid farewell for now on this subject. Thanks for looking, its been fun!

One of the most exciting finds in the giant ant hills in the Cretaceous limestones near Show Low was the hordes of tiny sharks teeth. Since I am not an expert on such, we called any flat triangular, round with sharp tip, or curved flat with sharp tip tooth a sharks tooth. Now I want you to try to imagine a bright red fire ant carrying a quarter inch big flat serrated sharks tooth in its big venomous jaws out of its hole and in one mighty thrust - throw it over the sides! These are our tiny fossil seeking robots, and they do a great job at bringing to the surface many types of microfossils that we never found ourselves even in the nearby layers of limestone. Here, Im going to highlight the teeth and show you some of the types we picked out of the slopes of countless gravel and sand grains on the sides of the big 4 foot ant hills. Most of the material was found by first identifying prospective ant hills that were hopefully abandoned that contained plenty of fossils. Then we scraped the sides into gallon bags to take back with us for washing and sorting. Unfortunately, some of the best hills were still shall we say - "active" and when you scraped a bit too hard they would all come rushing out to greet you with gaping biting jaws. There are hazards to micro fossil hunting for sure! Here are the images I took yesterday of the specimens with a 10x binocular microscope by pointing a digital camera into the eyepiece. Ive grouped them according to shape and type roughly, so thank you for looking and glad to share them with this group! The scale on the bottom of each image is in mm.