A Day With My Daughter : Stop-1

I’ve had today marked on my calender as a fossiling date with my daughter Juli for the past 4 weeks. We were going to Join Roy and Rob from Times Scientific at Ramanessin at 12:00 for their “Kids Dig” event, and decided to make a short stop at an Eocene/Miocene stream for a little fossil appetizer. The weather was absolutely beautiful, which was a great departure from the 100 degree days we’ve been dealing with for the past week. Not having alot of time, and not wanting to be late for the “Kids Dig” we went straight to a spot that had produced well for me in the past and set up. The first couple of screens didn’t turn up much in the way of fossils, but Juli did find a neat, non-fossil mammal vertebrae along with a small beaver incisor (also recent). The fossil ice was finally broken when Juli picked an awesome hammerhead tooth out of the screen. I had only found one slightly beat-up hammerhead tooth in NJ before this perfect specimen, so we were (I was) quite excited. Juli continued her uncommon tooth streak by pulling out a decent thresher anterior and a partial cow shark tooth. After a few more screens, the gravel I had been shoveling from the bottom of this 4ft deep section of stream began to dry up, so I moved upstream a little bit to a spot where an Eocene layer was exposed. This layer generally doesn’t contain a lot of gravel, but if you can shovel in the dark sand and sift at the same time, alot of material can be processed. I filled up the screen three or four times, sifting as I shoveled, until the screen bottom was covered with gravel. We started to finger through the sparse rocks and out it popped - an incredible Striaolamna tooth. It was about 1 3/4 inches long and other than a couple of slight dings at the tip, in really nice shape. We continued screening the dark sand and after about three more screens came the next great tooth - a perfect Eocene mako! We shoveled a couple more screens and called it a morning - on to the Kid’s Dig!