Late Christmas

Mrs. Bum decided to take the day off from work. That meant that for part of the afternoon she would lay back in the over stuffed Lazy Boy chair I bought for her last Christmas and take a long nap in my den. It also meant that I would have to be very quiet for a few hours. So I decided to go out into my lab and finish up a few projects. I had just finished screening the last of my Early Eocene material. I didn't want to start on another casting project just yet. So I went to my cabinet where I stash things away for cold weather. At the bottom was a sealed cat litter bucket that I had filled back in June. It was from a Late Cretaceous site in Florence, SC that the museum had been collecting from. I had already screened over 50 square feet of material in the last two years. The site had been producing a steady supply of dinosaur and marine reptile material for several years. One of the collectors had found a partial femur from a multituberculate mammal two years ago. It was the first Mesozoic mammal found from South Carolina. This started a long project of screening a large amount of the material in hope that another mammal bone would be found. I spent about 300 hours carefully sifting through the fine material. I found a p4 from a multituburculate for my efforts. It's been identified as a new species and will be published this coming year. When it was announced that the site was sold and would be filled in I went there one last time and filled a bucket with all of the loose material I could find. I was involved in two other projects at the time and decided to just put the bucket away for a rainy day. Or a day when Mrs. Bum was taking a nap. I was into my second hour of screening when I found a mammal tooth. Encouraged I continued screening for another hour and found a second one. One more hour of looking through a set of magnifiers and I was done. The third best thing I found was a very nice 1.25 inch mosasaur tooth. It turned out to be pretty good day for collecting. Even Mrs. Bum didn't complain when I woke her three times with my jumping up and down. I wonder what else I've got hidden in that cabinet? Care to take a look?