Happy Father's Day (eve) to Me! 06/20/10

I also had the pleasure of going on a Father’s Day trip this past weekend, but on Saturday.  My trips have been few and far between because of my daughter’s fastpitch softball travel and high school commitments and my related coaching commitments, and also HS graduation too.  But, now I finally have something to share.  Well, let me restate that, the interesting stuff wasn’t mine, but my daughter’s finds.  She is a human fossil shark tooth vacuum cleaner and once again found 10 teeth to my one it seems.  This has always been the case, but for some reason in the past I wound up finding the bigger teeth most of the time.  Well, let me tell you over the years you could sense that it began to bother her.  I kept telling her that she should be patient and her day would come.  And did it ever!  My personal goal was first to have a good time, and second to find stuff that I have avoided my collection (Palaeocarcharodon, Paraorthocodus, a ratfish plate to replace the one that I tossed away, etc.).  And, if I found a big Otodus tooth or something like that then that was gravy.  OK, truth be told here, all of those things except for the ratfish tooth avoided me again.  After years of collecting I’m still Palaeocarcharodon/Paraorthocodus challenged!  But, my daughter beat me to it!  Not only did she find a nice Paraorthocodus, but after we got home and she put her finds on display did I find out she had also found a Palaeocarcharodon orientalis, albeit a worn and beat up, but certainly both firsts for our collection!  But, she didn’t stop there.  We had worked as far as we wanted to go given the heat on Saturday and were working our way back now with the sun bearing down on us.  She was about 75 yards ahead of me with only one deadfall separating us when I heard a loud series of screams in the form of “Dad!!!!!... Dad!!!!!... Dad!!!!!...”, etc. (about 50 times and loud).  I looked up and witnessed her scaling the deadfall and sprinting my way with something clutched tightly in her hand.  When she got to me she opened her hand to show me in surprise and then launched a huge hug on me.  It’s a good thing too because that hug prevented about a gallon of river water from going down my gullet as my jaw certainly would have dropped to water level.  There in her hand was a huge Otodus obliquus tooth that I later measured at 2 ¾” slant height, nearly perfect except for some small chips on one side of the blade and a bit of tip damage.  The cusplets were amazing and look serrated to me (I’ll have to get a close up later).  Anyway, that hug, and the look in her face, the light in her eyes, made that the single best fossil hunting experience that I’ve ever been through. 

OK, now on to my stuff, pitiful in comparison to hers, but at least I did find something that I didn’t currently have in my collection that I once had found and threw it away, a ratfish plate.  Also, I found two nice croc teeth and a nice croc scute fragment, so those things made my trip as far as finds go.  But like I said earlier, what made the trip was that one hug and moment, and sharing such a nice day with my daughter.  I couldn’t have had a better Father’s Day.