Dear Diary....................................Jackpot!!!

My daughter’s volleyball schedule has really been cutting into my fossil hunting time over the past year; so when she came up with “fossil hunting” as answer #1 to the question of “what do you want to do on Memorial Day since your mother is working?” I just couldn’t let her down. It’s been probably about two or three years since I’ve collected with her and it’s amazing the difference those couple of years made. After the first hour of collecting, with my only good find being a decent but very typical crow shark tooth, she walks over and asks, “Are these great white teeth?” and pulls out a 1 3/8” mostly complete GW tooth and a ¾” juvenile GW tooth that was nearly perfect. She then pulls out a small bone looking item and asks what it is; a small reptilian scute. I nearly shed a tear. She found them simply scanning the gravel bars along with a bunch of other nice goblin teeth etc, completely on her own.
Over the next hour I was hitting some nice looking material and after finding two nice, fairly large mako teeth I decided I to stay committed to the spot until we left. Nothing decent came up but upon returning to the spoil pile I noticed a very atypical rock lying at the edge. I picked it up and immediately realized it was a partial elephant tooth. It was about 1/3 of a tooth with the root line very evident at the front. (after getting home and doing a little research I’m fairly certain it’s a gomphothere). I called Juli over and we exchanged fist bumps; a gomphothere tooth and two nice great whites certainly made the day collecting wise. At this point I could see Juli was getting a little worn out but to her credit she wouldn’t admit it, so I gave her the 5 screen warning. On the third screen load I lifted the shovel out of the water and there was a HUGE GW blade sticking out of the gravel laden sand. Most of the bottom parts of the tooth were still covered with sand so I immediately called Juli over and went to get my camera. I splashed the left side of the shovel and the sand melted away revealing one complete root lobe. Another splash to the right side and out comes the other root lobe; it’s a complete tooth!!!! I didn’t have a ruler or tape measure with me but I was fairly certain it would hit the 3” mark.
We get home and while I’m emptying the car I find Juli with a seamstress’s tape trying to straighten the tape to the tooth. I chide her crude methods of measurement and go get a drafting scale. We line the tooth up on the diagonal….. 3 3/16”!!! The thing is a beast and while I’ll probably never find another like it, I’ll enjoy every blister trying.