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Peace River Florida, Mammoths and Megalodons


Bone Daddy

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The last time I got out on the river was back in mid-January. Since then, I have watched the USGS gauges while the weather stayed mostly dry. The river height and flow was dropping steadily and just when I was ready to go hunting again, the entire house got sick with the flu - this was right before the coronavirus started grabbing all the headlines. It was very frustrating to sit inside the house while the weather was so beautiful and the river getting so low. Yesterday was the first day where the wife and I both felt close enough to 100% to brave the trip and go hunt some fossils. I loaded up the truck the night before and we headed out the door just before 7am.

 

The drive was uneventful and we arrived at the Gardner ramp on the Peace River about 9am.  We hadn't been back to Gardner since 2017, so it was a pleasant change of scenery from my usual spots. The plan was to revisit a couple of old spots we had found on previous trips back in 2016. I hadn't laid eyes on this stretch of river in a long time, so I was not sure what changes to expect. To my surprise, the ramp area was dead. Nobody else was there. Usually the ramp is quite busy, but our timing must have been very good. We had the entire area to ourselves. (Going on a tuesday morning helps)

 

The last time I was at Gardner, the water level was almost two feet higher, so I was pleased to see how low the water was. The current was also quite lazy. The USGS Zolfo Springs gauge read 4.6 feet and the flow was about 120. You can tell in the photo below how low the water is by looking at the opposite bank.

 

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Now, I am not going out of my way to obfuscate the exact location of my search spots in this report. This is because this stretch of river is heavily hunted and these spots are known to other hunters. This fact was reinforced on me when we arrived at the first spot and found shovel holes and spoil piles nearby. But more on that later... I have been to Gardner a handful of times previously, but the water was never this low. In fact, I ended up jumping out of the kayak and dragging it behind me while I waded through knee-deep water. My wife rode like a queen in the front seat of the tandem kayak and snapped photos.

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Our first destination was about a mile upstream, so there was a combination of wading/pulling the kayak and paddling. The water was running surprisingly hard in a couple of places, but the paddling was never too difficult. Most of the paddling was fairly easy with the wind pushing us from the south. We were looking for a clayey layer exposure known for producing prolific quantities of common fossils of mixed types - Miocene and Pleistocene material intermingled and then compacted into a tight cemented matrix. This material falls out of the sandy banks and into the river, where it breaks apart into gravel, fossils, and sand. There are several of these exposures along the Gardner stretch in both directions from the ramp, but each one has a slightly different character and mix of fossils. Some are heavier on Miocene material and some are heavier on Pleistocene, but all are mixed from being reworked over long periods of time by river action.

Before the fossil spots, we passed the entrance to Charlie Creek. You can't really tell from this photo (below), but the water is less than waist deep here. Charlie Creek is on the right and the main channel of the Peace is on the left. We didn't explore Charlie Creek today and we kept going.

 

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Finally, we found the first part of the exposure I was looking for. Flood action has lengthened the visible exposure and there was a gravel bed present that was missing on my previous trips. You can see it in the photo below as the dark stripe on the lighter-colored sandy bottom. The sun was lighting up the water and it had the color of weak tea.

 

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Here there was a fossiliferous layer of rocky-clayey matrix weathering into the river channel. You can see it as a white layer in the sandy bank in the photo below.

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There were shovel holes and a few spoil piles in the area, so other hunters had already visited this spot. The holes and piles looked fairly fresh, so it was likely within the the last few days. Still, the exposure is productive and a lot of new material is crumbling out the bank and ending up in the river. There is a lot of gravel and clay lumps to sift. Digging test holes along the water-line yielded a mix of small common fossils - dugong ribs, small shark teeth, megalodon teeth, turtle scutes, mammoth ivory fragments, mammoth tooth fragments, horse/camel/bison teeth, and the occasional vertebra/skull. I was hoping to find some nice intact megalodon or mammoth teeth. I found small pieces of both, but no large intact examples.

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Here are a couple of in-situ photos. In the first, you can see a nice bluish-colored shark tooth weathering out of the sandy matrix. In the second photo, you can see a piece of bone coming out of the matrix material - which is crumbly and loosely-consolidated with pieces of varying sizes.

 

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My wife was still not feeling too great physically, so she mainly surface-collected along the water-line while I shoveled a ton of sifters worth of gravel. I found a lot of dugong ribs. It was an All You Can Eat Ribs Special and I filled up a sack with them before I stopped picking them up. I left a bunch behind - just too many to mess with. I would work a spot for about 30-45 minutes and then move on further upstream searching out more exposures to sample. We sampled four different spots along a roughly mile to mile and a half stretch. All told, we spent about six hours on the river. Eventually, we turned around and decided to head back to the ramp to beat rush hour going back into Tampa. We had a leisurely, slow, and pleasant float back downstream to the ramp. On the entire trip, we only saw two other sets of humans. One was a husband-wife fishing duo who passed us in a flat-bottomed bass boat with a small outboard motor. The other was a group of three locals fishing from chairs near the ramp when we got back. Surprisingly, we only saw one small gator near the confluence with Charlie Creek. We did see and hear lots of birds though, which was nice.  :)

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Here is some of the stuff we found. Some is still drying out. Big chunks of micro-matrix are on the right - those will be searched later from home. Lots of ribs in the foreground. Lots of bone chunks and oddballs on the left in the rear.

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Unfortunately, I didn't find a single intact megalodon. The half-tooth in the photo was a tease. I saw it sticking up out of the sandy bottom and was excited when I reached down for it. I was disappointed when it was only half! LOL.

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I am still sorting through the oddballs and drying out some stuff. I cleaned up a nice fossil vertebra today. It is not complete, so I am not sure if it will be identifiable or not (not the same one I posted today in the ID forum). I'll post some more photos of the swag later if anything unusual or interesting turns up. All in all, it was a nice day. The bounty was heavy on quantity, but light on quality in terms of big sexy specimens.

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Wow, what a haul!  Sorry I can't help with the identification but was impressed with the quantity of your findings.

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The pictures of things still in the matrix is incredibly helpful. Your haul is jaw dropping, though. I can only hope we find a quarter of that treasure Sunday. 

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14 hours ago, Ruger9a said:

Wow, what a haul!  Sorry I can't help with the identification but was impressed with the quantity of your findings.

 

On days where it starts becoming apparent that a highlight find is not forthcoming, I get less picky and start going for quantity.

I would gladly trade all of those dugong ribs and micro-matrix for a single mastodon tooth or 3 to 4-inch megalodon.  :)

 

 

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13 hours ago, PODIGGER said:

Nice haul!  No way I could load all that dugong in my inflatable!

 

Have you ever posted a photo of your inflatable yak? I'm curious what it looks/feels like. I am also curious about their utility as a backpacking item - for reaching remote lakes and streams that are far from access points. Hike in, inflate the yak, do some paddling, deflate the yak, and hike out.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, Bone Daddy said:

 

On days where it starts becoming apparent that a highlight find is not forthcoming, I get less picky and start going for quantity.

I would gladly trade all of those dugong ribs and micro-matrix for a single mastodon tooth or 3 to 4-inch megalodon.  :)

 

 

LOL, I understand.  Sorry on the Meg tooth as I only have one and want to keep it.  How about one of my Granddaughter's baby teeth?

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1 hour ago, Kellyb said:

The pictures of things still in the matrix is incredibly helpful. Your haul is jaw dropping, though. I can only hope we find a quarter of that treasure Sunday. 

 

I won't be able to make it out there again as soon as this weekend, but I am trying to get out again sometime middle to late next week. What I posted here about Gardner applies to much of the Peace River. If you see features like these anywhere along the river, it's worth getting out of the boat to take a closer look. If you see shovel marks and spoil piles, then you know other hunters have been there. That can be good and bad. Good because they were hunting there for a reason - there might be more stuff they missed or didn't have time to finish taking. Or, it might be bad because they took all of the desirable stuff and tapped out that particular spot before moving on. Don't let it discourage you and always poke around and see if there is anything laying around. The best spots are further off the beaten path. The harder they are to reach, the less they get hunted. A lot of people don't stray far from the ramp.

 

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39 minutes ago, Ruger9a said:

LOL, I understand.  Sorry on the Meg tooth as I only have one and want to keep it.  How about one of my Granddaughter's baby teeth?

 

It was just a rhetorical thing. Any time I go out, I would rather find one or two highlight/rare pieces than a kayak full of common stuff. A good skull is worth 500 dugong ribs and turtle scutes. :D

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I will post a photo of the kayak after my next outing.  The kayak, pump, seats and paddle easily weigh 50+lbs, so I wouldn't recommend trying to carry it on your back for any long distance.

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21 hours ago, PODIGGER said:

I will post a photo of the kayak after my next outing.  The kayak, pump, seats and paddle easily weigh 50+lbs, so I wouldn't recommend trying to carry it on your back for any long distance.

 

I had no idea they were that heavy. Yeah, I wouldn't want to lug that around too far. But, that's also a good thing, because you don't want it to be too light and flimsy.

 

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Nice finds. Thanks for the report.

 

 

Mark.

 

Fossil hunting is easy -- they don't run away when you shoot at them!

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On 3/6/2020 at 1:56 PM, Mark Kmiecik said:

Nice finds. Thanks for the report.

 

Thanks Mark. I am trying to get out there again this week while this beautiful weather holds.  :)

 

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