First trip to Aurora

[Fin Lover]

Although I didn't find anything impressive, I thought I would share my first Aurora experience anyway, for those who have never been.

 

My husband and I made an impromptu trip to Aurora yesterday after hearing that they just got a new pile from the mines on Tuesday (opened it Wednesday).  It was a 5 hr drive each way, so we had to start really early, but there were already a lot of people digging when we arrived at 10.  Only one of the two piles had been replaced, although they are trying to get the second pile replaced before the middle of October.  

 

Word seems to get out quickly when they have a new pile and there were probably 50 people on our pile at once by the end of the day, so there wasn't much room other than to dig yourself one hole and hope you found a good spot.  We had quickly made sifters the night before and made two different screen sizes, but the bigger one was way too big so my husband decided not to even use it. We didn't find anything to write home about, but did get a couple of things that I don't find much of in Summerville.  

 

You could occasionally hear someone else excited about a find, but most of those were beginners and the finds were broken 1/2 inch teeth. The guy beside me did find two or three broken cow shark teeth and a half of a maybe 3 inch meg.  Other than that, I saw someone with a nice mako and someone with a big great white, but it had a broken root (or it looked like it from where I was sitting).  There were rumors that two megs had been found in the old pile the day before, but I didn't hear about size or condition.

 

The museum was smaller than I expected, but one area was closed off, so I don't know how much was off exhibit.  It was still nice to see some of the displays.  The weather was nice, which was appreciated since the new pile was in the full sun all day.

 

So, my husband didn't sift and didn't even look as long as I did (which was about 5.5 hours), but here are some pictures of our finds.

 

The whole teeth:

 

The broken teeth:

 

Lots of ray mouthparts:

 

A dolphin tooth:

We also picked up a few shells, pieces of bone and vertebrae, a small piece of crab claw, and some other random things.

 

I'm not sure if it is still allowed, but we put some of the material that we had already screened in a couple zipper bags and brought them home so I could try looking for micro teeth.  It was very tedious so I'm sure I still could have found smaller teeth, but I decided it wasn't worth any additional effort (and neck pain).  Here are the micro teeth:

 

So, all in all, it was a good experience, but probably not worth making the drive very often.  We did end up with probably about 500 teeth (including the broken ones), but I was hoping for a couple nice larger teeth.

 

Thanks for reading!

[Meganeura]

I see that really nice albeit small Mako at the bottom there! Still - those are some really pretty teeth - I love the micros too!

[Fin Lover]

Thanks!  Yeah, I don't find many makos, so that was probably my best one of the day.