Peace, River Fossil hunting

Yes they do! I had some down in North Carolina when I was stationed down there.

rockbrain - What an awesome excursion! You're a lot "braver" than I am being in freakin' canoe around those dinosaurs!  LOL

Our Peace River trip was yesterday. We had a blast but I certainly slept well last night. I was a little bit sore from my short excursion the day before. This trip was actually 8 mi of paddling. They take you upriver and a bus and drop you off at a campground. It was just my son and I on the bus today. We only saw two other people on the river. I love it when it's like that! I'd go down here any day over one of the crowded theme parks. They dropped us off, we loaded the canoe, and headed downstream.

This is the upstream view from the launch area.





Ready to start the day.

This place got absolutely devastated by the hurricane. The outpost where we rented from had just finished a bunch of renovations. It was all wiped out. They did a lot of work to get it back together. A lot of houses destroyed. Lots of old growth cypress trees just ripped out by the roots. The river is still beautiful but there's some sections that got wiped out pretty bad. It will take years for it to come back because of the age of the trees. When I came a couple of years ago we saw loads and loads of turtles along the way. This time we saw four real big ones and that was it. Still plenty of alligators but they were all smaller ones. Some of them were probably five or six footers. Last year we saw a few monsters I had to be at least 12 ft.

You've been a lot of cleanup on the river since the storm, but you still see stuff once in a while like a refrigerator in the top of the tree.  Towards the top of this picture in the center are three flights of stairs that are perched there horizontal stacked on each other.

Now the payoff. We found lots of the typical fossilized dugong bones, a couple of bird bones. Some unidentified pieces, and a whole bunch of smaller shark's teeth. I found one nice size specimen that's in a really good condition. Kind of a nod tooth because it's wider than it is long. It's got some nice colors on it which is unusual for the piece River. The vast majority of the fossils from there are black.  I'll probably try to do something to make a pendant with it. Kind of weird because it's curved and I think it actually looks better from the back than the front more the tooth part shows.

Then to top off the day we found a place called Blackburn's BBQ. I'm a barbecue of aficionado and seek it out almost everywhere I go. I know every barbecue place in the city of Fresno where my wife was getting cancer treatments. This is one of the best ones I found. We ordered a ridiculous amount of food for what I thought was just downright cheap. We each ordered a three meat combo with brisket, ribs and pulled pork. We each added on a smoked sausage. Split two deviled egg halfs with pulled pork and barbecue sauce on top. Plus a couple of giant drinks that they kept refilling that you could get to go cups for. I knew it was going to be good when we got there at 5:30 on Wednesday night and you couldn't hardly get into place. 45 minute wait if you wanted in order to go. An hour if you called it in on the phone. All of the meat was absolutely incredible. Macaroni and cheese was amazing. Coleslaw and smoked cabbage were both solid. We had incredible service. Everybody in the place was just totally hustling. The total bill before tip was $52. I had some for lunch and my daughter-in-law had some for lunch. I think my son ate a rib. My wife made barbecued Tochos for all four of us for dinner. I still have enough brisket left for two nice sandwiches! I think it was all the caffeine from the giant soda and sweet tea that kept us from going into a food coma for the rest of the hour and a half ride home. 

This is a picture of the biggest and the smallest teeth that we found.

I got pretty excited when I found a Meg tooth! I didn't even need the sifter screen. I put a couple of scoops in and The point was sticking about an inch straight out the top. There's literally tons of fossilized dugong bones and I had already been fooled several times by pointed shards of them. Actually, I was fooled several times by serrated leaves in the bottom of my sifter. It seems everything that you scoop out of the Peace River and throw in your screen is black.

Other than the doodoo banded chalcedony did you find anything?