You don’t always have to get there early….

Finally, after hunting mainly for echinoids the last few months – and quite successful I might add –, the finds being made by others in Mill/Langenboom made us go there and try our luck once more.

All said and done, we were late to leave – something that seems to be inevitable when my spouse and son are coming along – and didn’t make it into the pit before 12 AM.

Knowing that the weather was fine – a week earlier people had been digging in flurries of snow – I was sure lots of “fortune-seekers” would be there, trying their luck. So I assume you can appreciate the complete and utter agony during the 1.5 hours drive over.

But ….. despite an overturned car blocking the highway and the resulting traffic jam ……..eventually we got there to witness some 15+ hunters digging holes of various depths.

After making a quick assessment of the havoc wreathed by others and asking around, it turned out that the last few hours of the preceding Friday the pipe had vomited a mix of sand and gravel with little teeth. So basically you had to get down to some 1.5 – 2 meters before teeth started to show up and even then sparsely.

At this place I think a special thanks by me and my son is in order, to all those guys who came early and left early, but in the process removed a lot of material so we were much closer to the proper layers.

No heroic stories about the dig itself apart from the fact that a friend I had taken along complained about his back so I dug to fill three screens: my friend's, my son's and my own. Only benefit was we made good headway and I had first pick, meaning any teeth showing in the hole itself were mine to keep. Nonetheless, I managed to drop a beautiful 4 cm blue lower C. hastalis tooth in my friends screen. But the gorgeous, flawless G. cuvier – a rare find in Mill - that wound up in my screen soon after made me forget that “mistake” quickly.

All in all, finds were not great in numbers but what they lacked in numbers they made up in quality. As is usual when I let others tag along, I could have dug all day, but my friend (bored and sore back) and son (too long between finds, despite me “seeding” his screen when he didn’t look) made me stop after some three hours into the work-out. Apart from the G. cuvier the only other less common tooth I found was a lower hexanchid. I am still not sure whether it’s a Notorynchus or Hexanchus…..

Cheers,

Paul