Last Dive of 2009

Da fossZ called me mid-week and asked me if I wanted to go to the river this weekend. Of course I agreed, even though I knew it was going to be cold. Then I got an email from LC asking me if I wanted to to diving. Sure! The more the merrier! Then t$ joined in the fun, followed by Megamouth and the Weezling. A quick call to Edisto Mike and we had a boat full!

When we arrived at the river, it was windy, overcast, and cool. Not ideal conditions, but good enough to dive! It only took a couple of minutes for Megamouth and the Weezling to agree that the water was too cold and the current too tough to fight wearing wetsuits, so both decided to sit on the boat. The rest of us decided the fossils were worth the pain and we went ahead with our dives. As soon as I hit the water, the chill took ahold of me and never let go the rest of the day. I don't normally dive with a wetsuit, and even though it did keep me warmer than not wearing a wetsuit, the current had its way with me all day because of my added buoyancy. I stuck my screwdriver in the bottom only to see it plowing a trench rather than keeping me in place. I had to get out of the channel. Finally I moved behind a sandbar and I could stay in one place. There was a nice gravel bar back there and I just kept working it. My first notable find was a really nice Parotodus benedeni shark tooth, the best I have ever found in the river. I had my camera, of course, and I filmed all the big complete stuff, but I just wasn't finding that much.

Towards the end of the last dive I fanned out a decent sized tooth, but I could tell that it was not complete. Since I didn't have much footage, I decided to film it anyway. It was the last thing I found during my short but productive 2009 river diving season. On the boat, df showed off his wicked pathologic posterior angustidens and I pulled out my benedeni. I also showed off the last tooth I found, and I noticed that it had a large hole through the center, completely through the other side. Then I noticed a smaller hole right between the root lobes that intersected the larger hole in the center. We find a lot of fossils with holes in them. There are a couple of ways they occur. One way is through natural erosion. A piece of sand or gravel sits on the the tooth in a minor impression, and over time the current causes the sand or gravel to spin and drill into the fossil. Clams also bore holes in fossils. But the holes in this shark tooth were not naturally occurring. There was only one explanation - a native american drilled the holes. I imagined that someone a long time ago wore this tooth as a piece of jewelry, and the holes were made to thread some sort of twine.