Who Needs Shark Teeth?

Saturday was a father/daughter fossiling day with my daughter being able to sport her new hip boots for the first time. Our plan was to hunt Ramanessin Creek for a while in the morning and then make a stop at an Eocene/Miocene stream in the afternoon. We started out on a section of Ramanessin that I had never hunted before. After about 45 minutes of finding very little, Juli informed me that the back of her pants got wet from getting down too close to the water, so we quickly headed back to the car so she could change (yes, I’m an Eagle Scout). Upon returning to the creek, we decided to head down to an area we had hunted before, figuring the past month’s heavy rain fall had churned things up a bit. After about 5 screen loads, Juli picked out one of the nicest Enchodus teeth I’ve ever seen. We snapped a couple of pictures while her glow was still fresh and continued searching. The spot didn’t produce much more, so again we picked up and headed to another spot where I had done well in the past. The area is generally very shallow, and hadn’t changed much with last month’s rain, but just upstream, the storms had carved a 4 ft gully into the creek bottom. I probed the sand bottom with my shovel and could feel the gravel within. While the hole didn’t produce any exceptional shark teeth, it did produce a mostly complete ammonite, a fairly complete ghost shrimp in matrix, an unusual piece of a mammal tooth and a nice sized Enchodus jaw section that matched up well with Juli’s tooth. With my daughter beginning to feel the cold, we scanned our last couple screens and headed back to the car. Juli didn’t want to stay at our second stop for long, so we decided to search through 10 screen loads and call it a day. Again no killer shark teeth, but we did manage a small chubby blade and a really nice fossilized beaver molar - not bad for 10 screen loads. What a day!