Even My Daughter Finds Bigger Teeth Than Me

Today’s miserable morning turned into a great afternoon which allowed my 7 year old daughter Juli and I to get out for an impromptu fossil outing. I was worried that with all the rain we’ve had in the last 24 hours the water would be too high for Juli, so I brought a blanket along to set her up on the bank, away from the water, where we both could scan the screens just in case. Upon arrival I could see that the water was high and we would have to stick with scanning on the blanket as planned. The water was at my waist in the deepest parts which wasn’t so bad, but it was moving faster than normal which made it very difficult to get a shovel full of gravel off the bottom, without 3/4 of it getting washed off before getting to the surface - I had my daughter cover her ears on numerous occasions. After not finding much in the first hour, Juli’s attention was turning more towards finding pretty leaves - and I was getting more and more frustrated having to work so hard only to find “pretty rocks”(Juli took home a container full). After planting the seed that we would be leaving soon, I tried one more spot just upstream that was slightly shallower. I probed the bottom with my shovel and finally hit an area rich in gravel. That area was productive just enough that we could have a fossiling competition for who could find the largest tooth in each screen (my daughter won for all but one screen, of course). My find for the day was a decent chubutensis blade, but Juli took biggest tooth honors with a 1 3/4 inch Sand Tiger (possibly mako) blade (There’s got to be a 2"+ whole one in there somewhere!)