Arctic Angustidens

I can't get enough fossil hunting. I really can't. I try going more often but it just results in my wanting to go more. The weather is getting cooler now and so is the river. Today as soon as I hit the water a cold jolt shot through me like an megalodon attack at the north pole.  Normally I get used to the chill pretty quickly but I never shook it all day. But I didn't care! I hadn't found a really nice keeper tooth in the river this season and I was on a bend that I had not hunted in almost 2 years. The excitement drove me against the chilly, rushing current. For almost two hours I fanned the sand looking for fossils washing directly out of the layer. I found a piece of a large piece of turtle shell, soon followed by a whale skull. I didn't even try to remove it. 5 times that effort has ended badly in the river. I filmed it and moved on. I gathered some samples of the layer for t$ and took some pictures. Then I started swimming the bank, scanning for teeth freshly eroded. When we first found this spot there were fossils everywhere. But over the years we cleaned them out. The river always changes and the fossils are replenished, and since it had been so long since my last scan of the bank I was hopeful that I would come away with a nice tooth or two. I swam past a log jam and noticed a big triangle laying motionless at the bottom of the river. It was obviously a big tooth and I grinned underwater. I saw that it had a dinged tip, but it was still a big tooth. It made me realize that there were teeth on the bank so I should really pay close attention. I swam up a little and noticed an even larger triangle buried in the sand. At first it looked like a bottle, but having just found a big tooth I examined it a little closer. TOOTH! It's hard to chant "Please be whole" through a regulator, but I uttered something close and fired up the camera. I have been waiting for a long time to film the extraction of such a specimen - I was really hoping it would be whole!

 With a flip of my glove, I started fanning. Each time the sand and gravel moved revealed more enamel, more root. Once I was sure it wasn't attached to the underlying formation, I picked it up and turned it over in my had. First I checked the tip - that's the part that's almost always missing. It was there! Next I checked the cusps, both also present. finally I examined the root. CHECK! I held in my hand a massive angustidens tooth that appeared to be complete from root to tip. I couldn't tell if the bourlette was there because the tooth was so encrusted with algae and river crust, but it was complete enough for me to swim back to the boat and put the tooth somewhere safe while I completed my dive.