Back to Alabama

Well, its been about a year since my last Alabama trip and I've had many dreams of heading back there, literally. I didn't get much time here last November, but this time I planned for a week long dig in the early Eocene deposits of southern Alabama. This is a site with a lot of digging and sifting the material you dig out of a rather extensive fossil bearing layer. My girlfriend and I set out to really move some dirt. We moved so much dirt that even Ditchweezil would've been proud! We encountered a small landslide of the formation that we had to dig out and screen before we actually could dig on the embankment itself. We dug all of that out and continued on the embankment and pretty well established a man-made beach on this section of the waterway. We dug so much on this embankment that we ended up causing a landslide event of our own. My girlfriend was digging the lowest layer of the formation and we had undercut it a fair amount and then when I was standing there we heard a bit of a groaning/popping noise and I think "Oh $%@*!" and she darts out of there in the nick of time. Right where she had been crouched down now stood a pile of dirt about 4 feet tall and perhaps 3 feet from front to back and it literally stretched 15 feet in total length. Needless to say, bad things would've happened if it fell on her. I did lose a screen plus a shovel in that cave-in. The screen was recovered, although it was flattened. The army shovel I had is gone and will be found by someone, sometime. I'm sad about the screen since it was its maiden hunt, and I'm really sad about the shovel, but like a good soldier, it went down in the line of duty. As for results, we pulled out a LOT of shark teeth. I couldn't even begin to count total numbers of what we found. But some noteworthy items are a small Carcharocles auriculatis, which although not complete, is a nice find for me. Come on, how many have seen an auriculatis from Alabama? I take solace in the fact I didn't hit it with the shovel, but the damage took place long before I found it. We also found things like a couple of crocodile teeth, some sawfish rostral teeth, nurse shark teeth, some angel shark teeth, and the list goes on. I do not have anywhere close to the total number of pictures I will have of the material but I will add them as I get the pictures. So the ones you see here are just for starters. We did hit a cretaeous site in Alabama as well and had good results but the report for that will be soon in coming with pictures of the finds as well.