Peace River Hunt...Finally!--April 2016

[digit]

Some sort of giant tortoise foot pad or osteoderm did pass through my mind when I was trying to figure out the identity of the hamburger patty looking unknown. I just don't see enough giant tortoise leg bits to be familiar enough with them.

Hoping to get out to the chunky gravel location again tomorrow with guarded yet high hopes for further finds.

Cheers.

-Ken

[digit]

Here are a few other fossils that turned up during the pleasurable day hunting on the Peace River. The (relatively) tiny 3-toed horse molar is dwarfed by the much larger upper molar from the more modern Equus horse tooth. This is the first time I've found nice examples of each on a single day (the smaller tooth at the first stop and the larger one at the second site with the larger gravel). I thought it would be fun to get some comparative photos of the two molars side-by-side.

P4240041.JPG P4240042.JPG

Dr. Hulbert confirmed what I did know--that the large horse tooth was an Equus upper molar (at least I've seen enough of these to have these down pat). The tiny tooth next to it he identified as an upper third or forth premolar (P3 or P4) of Pseudhipparion skinneri, a Miocene species that he should know well as he (along with S.D. Webb) described the species in 1986--I guess you could say I got that "from the horse's mouth". (It's okay to groan, really. )

Cheers.

-Ken

[ynot]

WOW, nice find in hiding!! Congratulations!!

Tony

[digit]

Thanks. Up early this morning to have another crack at that site. Will be leaving the house in a little while in order to make it to Canoe Outpost to get the paperwork done for today's canoe rental. This time I'm going to devote all of my digging time to just this site with the chunky gravel to see what I can turn up. Still time to post an entry to FOTM if I get extremely lucky. Gonna be really difficult driving all the way there and then paddling the canoe with my fingers crossed the entire time. Even if I score nothing as good as last weekend, it's the thrill of the potential that has me up at 3am--just to try.

Cheers.

-Ken

[joshuajbelanger]

Beautiful mammoth, and well done blog. Very interesting! I love it when people go into great detail, there's always nuggets of wisdom to be had from others. Great finds, keep em coming!

[digit]

So here is the sequel to this trip report. I after having some success at the second stop during my trip out to the Peace River last weekend, I felt that I had not had enough time to work the coarse gravel to shake loose a significant portion of its riches. I had seriously considered booking a hotel room Saturday night and some dry clothes for a revisit on the following day (Sunday) but I had a friend flying in to stay with us on Monday and I really couldn't afford the extra day during that weekend. Thankfully, the rains have stayed away last week and allowed the river to even drop another half a foot or so giving me the opportunity to revisit the river on the following weekend. I'd been busy working on training materials all week for a coral reef surveying class I'll be giving in Akumal next week (this trip will keep me from fossil hunting over the next two weekends). I did not have the time to head over the night before and so decided to make this a day trip. This involved me getting up at 3am Saturday morning to drive through the dark to Arcadia. I had everything packed in the car the night before but ended up getting up early anyway (just couldn't sleep) at just after 2am. We headed out on nearly empty roads and made it to Okeechobee (a little city with a population of around 5,000 at the northern tip of the lake of the same name--Lake Okeechobee) in time for a quick breakfast and some caffeine to keep me alert for the remainder of the drive.

We checked in at Canoe Outpost and road the bus up to Brownville (while I closed my eyes and tried to get in a quick cat nap). As we paddled downstream we passed a huge group who were occupying the well-known gravel bed just a little downstream of the boat ramp at Brownville. We were glad that we were bypassing this site this time as the place was way too crowded for my liking. While I enjoy seeing groups out fossil hunting on the Peace River, clusters of this size tend to be raucous and I was glad we'd be heading downstream to a more peaceful location to dig. As we passed I could see from the signs they had posted in the river to mark the beginning and end of the gravel bed that this group was from the Creation Studies Institute in Fort Lauderdale. This is an interesting group that has mustered significant cognitive dissonance to meld their simultaneous beliefs in Young Earth and Great Flood Creationism with the existence (and not denial of) fossils. In their hybrid system of science and religion only a great flood could have deposited whale vertebrae and shark teeth 30 miles inland. I've got no desire to derail this thread into a religious debate so please don't take it there. This was just the first time I'd encountered this group on the river in over eight years of hunting there during one of their Fossil Floats and so I thought I'd mention it as part of my trip report. We threaded our canoe through the mass of people stretching from bank to bank and continued on our way to our destination leaving the din of activity far behind.

I wanted to spend as much time at the coarse gravel site as possible so we wasted no time inspecting spots along the way (as we had done the previous Saturday). We arrived in good time at our spot and we could see that more of the bank was exposed showing that the water had dropped some since last week. I wasted no time in locating the spot with the coarse gravel (and the small pit I had started on the previous trip. It was good to be back again and with more time to explore this promising site. This is my idea of fossil hunting heaven--not another canoe in sight and nothing but the sound of my sifting and the occasional Osprey or Red-shouldered Hawk calling overhead.

[digit]

It didn't take long to get back in the swing of things--a good size shamer of a meg tooth turned up in the second screen of the day. We had several more smaller megs turn up but, as usual, most were "fraglodons" and only two small ones were mostly intact. When we fossil hunt in the river we wear cloth nail aprons (from our local home improvement store) which we call "goody belts". Very convenient to just drop fossils in one of the two pockets instead of pulling a zip-top plastic bag out of your pocket each time you find a fossil. We occasionally, return to the canoe and empty out our pockets into plastic bags when we take a break for a snack or a drink. We keep broken megs and other possibly interesting fossils in one of the pockets we designate as the "giveaway" pocket. When we see canoes with kids in them heading downstream (and occasionally heading right for us--first time canoeists tend not to be able to steer very well) we ask them if they'd like some fossils. Always fun to see the kids faces when they unexpectedly receive a large piece of meg tooth or a chunk of mammoth or mastodon tooth. Here's a photo of the first fraglogon of the day and another smaller meg that you might be able to spot in the sifting screen in the lower picture.

After some time, the rest of the day's canoes started catching up with us and they would often inquire about these odd people standing in the river with shovels. The questions, as usual, range from asking us how much gold we have found (from the uninformed) to us if we have found any interesting fossils yet. We started to laugh when we noticed that as each group of canoes would pass by us, we would start finding nice horse teeth in our sifting screens. It seemed that we wouldn't find another one till the next cluster of canoes was upon us. After this happened three or four times we started anticipating the next group so we could find some more horse molars. There was obviously no cause and effect but the correlation was quite impressive and added another fun dimension to the day's hunting. Here's a sample of the contents of a nice screen just as it appeared after a canoe had passed. I hadn't even had time to shake out all of the sand when these finds emerged on the surface. In the last picture below see if you can spot the half meg fraglodon, the base of a deer antler, and a lower molar from a horse (Equus).

[digit]

I continued to work the coarse gravel from where I had started last Saturday. Occasionally, I'd encounter a chunk of rock that was too big to fit on the end of my shovel and I'd have to pick it up by hand and shot-put it as far away from where we were digging as I could manage. One piece was bigger around than my entire sifting screen and I had all to do even to pry it from the sandy bottom. It was way too large to even pick up so all I could do is to roll it over to an area I had already dug so that I could get to the gravel it was covering. Just before noon I bent down to clear yet another cluster of large rocks so that I could continue shoveling. Once again I felt a distinctive pattern of ridges on one side of the unseen obstruction and told Tammy to go fetch the camera. She gave me the "are you kidding" look but I repeated my request for her photo journalistic skills. As she photographed, I was able to pry this piece from the mud and clay in the bottom and bring it slowly to the surface.

This chunk of Columbian Mammoth (Mammuthus columbi) molar was a little different from the other four pieces I've pulled from this exact same spot. It still had lines of sandy matrix adhering to the valleys of the ridges along the sides and along the elongated ellipses of enamel on the top (occlusal) surface of the tooth. Even after I later soaked this tooth in fresh water and scrubbed it with a brush, the majority of the sandy matrix remains glued to the tooth). Rather than cleaning off the matrix from this specimen I've decided to leave it with the sparse matrix coating as it gives it an odd charm. You may be able to spot the small shark tooth adhering to the matrix layer on the occlusal surface of the tooth in the photo above. I did not notice this was there till I started cleaning the tooth. I think I'll keep that in place as well.

Other than some smaller fragments of mammoth, that seemed to be the last large chunk that this site was planning on giving me for a while.

[digit]

In addition to the third large chunk of mammoth I've pulled from this spot in my last two visits, the site continued to deliver some interesting finds on a pretty regular basis. Oddly, there were no "armadillo" (Glyptodon or Holmesina) scutes found at this site during either Saturday. I can't think back to ever having found any at this location when I've hunted it in the past. While the smaller shark teeth would have fallen through my 1/2" screen, I surprisingly only found a single Tiger Shark tooth--not that I minded as we here having fun with other interesting finds. We had a total of five small (and worn) whale tympanic bullae and I do remember one trip in the past when we pulled well over a dozen from this site. We ended up with seven nicely rooted Equus molars (two upper and five lower). We even found a matching 3-toed horse upper molar to go with the one we found last Saturday (might make interesting cuff-links or unusual earrings. ). No gator osteoderms this time but in addition to a huge fossil gator tooth we also came across one which was quite a bit fresher. It was quite easy to spot among the black gravel in our sifter.

The trip-maker of the day, however, turn out not to be the addition of another mammoth molar fragment to my ever-growing collection but something smaller and more unusual (for us, anyway). When this popped-up in our sifting screen sitting proud on top of the gravel I knew instantly what it was--a whale tooth. This was not one of the smaller dolphin teeth that we've found in the past in the Peace River--this one had some heft to it. Now I'll have to start researching what types of Odontoceti (toothed whales) can be found in the Peace River to see how precise of an identification I'll be able to hang off my new favorite find. People have often asked me which is my favorite fossil and I have to tell them that that honor goes to my current last-found fossil as well as the next one I'll find. For now, this one tops my list till something else replaces it.

Cheers.

-Ken

[Auspex]

I guess noodling for mammoths is one of the more interesting Peace River sports...

[digit]

Beats sticking your arm in the mouth of a large catfish.

Jeff (jcbshark) has set his TFF member title to "Nerd Noodler" and so I guess "Mammoth Noodler" could be appropriate. Tammy has been calling me the "Mammoth Whisperer" as I seem to be quietly calling these molar chunks to me with my arm up to the shoulder in the river and my face near water level. I think there is likely more interesting stuff at this site as I was not able to get through all of the gravel (but put a bigger dent in it this time). It will be a few weeks (at least) before I can get back to this site and I'm looking into options where I can paddle less and dig more. Hoping the river cooperates and doesn't make this a really short season this year--couldn't really complain with my current finds if it did though.

I'll try to add some photos of some of my other finds from Saturday when I get a moment.

Cheers.

-Ken

[ynot]

Nice finds and report. I really enjoy the vicarious time that I can spend on the peace with Y'All!!

Thanks and congratulations on all the good finds.

Tony

[Sacha]

Super finds Ken. Are you letting Tammy in on the action at all, or do you make her stand by your side with the camera all day?

[digit]

Nope. She'd never let me go if she was relegated just to photo-chronicling my adventures (and misadventures). Last trip I was taking most of the photos but this time she hung the waterproof camera case around her neck so she had access to the camera more than I did. As much as possible, Tammy is my hunting partner so we can have shared memories of fun times together. I rarely go hunting without her. I know many TFF members couldn't entice their significant others out on a fossil hunt with the promise of a large cash prize but I'm lucky and I know it (Tammy reminds me a lot) that she enjoys the thrill of the hunt as much as I do.

Hoping that after I get back from my trip to Akumal that the river will still be low enough that we can get out again. It's been a year now since we've dipped a sifter together and I seem to be in tune with mammoths lately so maybe we could score something big before the season is over.

Cheers.

-Ken

[digit]

Here's a better view of the odontoceti (whale) tooth that was my trip-maker last Saturday. A nice whale tooth (not the smaller dolphin teeth) has been on my Peace River bucket list for quite some time. Scratch that one off the list and move on to the others (it's a long list).

I'm wondering if this tooth (in reasonable shape) might be distinctive enough to assign to a family (or even genus) or if odontoceti tooth is as precise as I'll be able to get? If I attract no replies to its ID, I'll repost in the Fossil ID section.

Cheers.

-Ken

[ynot]

Hey Ken,

Check out post 3, 10 and 14 in this thread-- http://www.thefossilforum.com/index.php?/topic/64678-pathologic-whale-tooth-id/

Nice ceatation tooth!

Tony

[digit]

Here are some of the horse molars that we found last Saturday. We had a nice assortment of upper (square) and lower (rectangular) cheek teeth--most in really nice shape.

My favorite lower molar is in really nice condition and very complete with a nice full length and no damage at all to the root end. I like the color and texture of this one.

Here is a comparison of two of the upper molars--the left one being unerupted. You can see what the occlusal surface looks like before it starts to wear into its normal "working" surface. There is just a tiny spot in the upper left of the unerupted tooth where you can see the slightest bit of wear that has started to open up the swirled enamel layers that later on function so well in grinding this equid's grassy meals. When I first saw an unerupted Equus molar it completely confused me and I thought it must be from some other large animal but I soon learned about these teeth that had not seen much (or any) use at the time the animal expired and left these to the fossilization process. Maybe this side-by-side comparison will help others understand their unusual horse molar finds.

Cheers.

-Ken