I had the pleasure of having a fantastic birthday as my daughter and I spent some quality time doing our second favorite hobby (next to fishing of course), fossil collecting. That in itself makes it one of my best birthdays ever, especially since I camped and fished for stripers for three days prior while fireworks were going off all along the Maryland and Virginia shoreline!
OK, enough mushy stuff, on with the report. We spent the day collecting the Paleocene of Maryland along the Potomac River. I wasn't expecting much since we just had a long holiday weekend with lots of boaters out and probably lots of collectors from shore over the weekend. I was thinking that it would be pretty much picked clean. My daughter and I scoured the shoreline and found a fair amount of teeth with the usual mix of sand tigers, broken Otodus teeth, a few croc teeth, and some turtle shells. However, about half way through the trip prior to our lunch break she was sitting on a rock taking in the scenery during a little break. I was collecting behind her and just walked passed her and stopped to think about having lunch. I was wading in about knee deep water and happened to look down and around my feet. The water was calm, not much waves, and very clear, so visibility was good. I looked down and saw a weird banana shaped rock and thought it was odd looking, so naturally I had to check it out. I was hoping it was a root. Here is what I saw:
Well, I had to pull it out, so here is the result:
It measures about 2 1/4" high, slant is slightly over 2 3/8", by far my biggest Otodus ever!
Here are my finds (145 of the usual teeth, one big tooth, a couple croc teeth, some stingray plates and turtle shell pieces:
Here are my daughter's finds (I think I counted 361 teeth, some stingray plates, and some croc teeth:
I had a blast!
