11 cusp Hexanchus (Holy Cow!)

Anyone in the mine back on Saturday, 29 March 08?

For me--- especially with finding this killer cow--- it was a day to be remembered!

We were again going in with the NCFC that day. It was cloudy, cool (maybe topped out around 50 degrees), and VERY windy! While it wasn’t the nicest of days to be hunting, my wife and I were still determined to make the most of it, and were walking/working hard! Even though there was a lot of good, weathered Yorktown, we were only having an ‘average’ day. (Possibly because we were also striving to stay in the ‘valleys’ and out of the wind!)

Although we never rush to get back to the bus, today’s weather kind of wore on us. My best finds included a dinger 3 5/8” upper anterior Meg and a really nice lower, and since we were towards the very back of the hunting area, I told my wife, “Let’s go ahead and move back towards the ramp.” We were walking on the tops of the hills to take the shortest and easiest route when we came upon an area full of Yorktown sediment that we hadn’t yet hunted. Although it had been notably scratched-around-in, we decided to hunker-down out of the wind on the upper 1/3 of this hill to do a bit more searching. With our heads bowed and shoulders hunched, we spent a while looking without much luck. I had worked my way back up in my searching, and was behind the ‘clay boulder’ that crowned the very top of the hill, growling about the wind and about such good Y’town already being so heavily covered (or at least not yielding-up any treasures to me, LOL).

As I raised my head just a bit to see if I could peep over the backside, I was blown away by what I saw on the surface of that clay boulder:

a perfectly exposed and quite large Hex!

I yelled to my wife, “Holy ****, look at that huge cowshark tooth!!!”

(She didn’t see it until she came up right beside me and I pointed it out, as it was so close the color of the sediment that it was quite well camouflaged.)

Root up and tip down, it was literally the only thing showing anywhere on the face of this boulder, and it was apparent that a single touch (or maybe a single drop of rain) would be enough to cause it to drop into the matrix.

I put one hand underneath it, gently touched one corner of the root, and it was mine!

I have no idea how many hunters had walked right by it, as it was clear that someone had “worked” the Yorktown all around the top of this hill pretty heavily. But I feel certain that I wouldn’t have seen it, either, had I not been hunkered-down, nose to the ground, trying to get out of the wind.

Good fortune was surely smiling on me that day… prolly the best cow shark tooth I can ever hope to find!

(And, yes, it was more than enough to stop further growling, LOL!)