I made a drive to explore a new creek in Hill County Friday morning. It ended up being some of the toughest hiking in a creek bottom I’ve done. This is another Eagle Ford outcrop, and in satellite photos, the blue-gray shale went from the sides of the creek walls all the way to the bottom of the creek bed, just like the Ellis County creek I visited last week. In real life on Friday, the creek bed was full of mud, and it covered much of the lower walls of the creek too. I’ve never seen such a difference in a reasonably recent satellite photo and actual appearance.

To make matters worse, it rained Thursday. I didn’t think the showers had reached that far west, but I was mistaken. It didn’t raise the water too much, but it made the creek bottom a muddy mess. I’ve never before gotten this muddy hiking a creek, and it really wore me down, slogging through that.

With the mud that high, there was no finding any fossiliferous layers of matrix anywhere in the creek walls, but there were plenty of broken pieces of it, along with shale pieces, in the bottom of the creek. So, I spent my time looking for individual fossils on the gravel bars (more like mud bars). But the rain had turned the shale really dark, and that along with the dark brown mud, made spotting fossils really tough. I picked up lots of likely looking pieces of matrix too, and I did find a few things.

Here are the only teeth I found that weren’t seriously encased in matrix. I really should stop picking up modern bison teeth, but can never seem to resist them. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Here are all but one of the other teeth I found. They are buried in matrix, and it’s not matrix that softened at all after two days in water. I’m trying vinegar now. It may come down to just using a dental pick to retrieve what I can see on the surface of these matrix pieces.

There were lots of small ammonite imprints in matrix, but I never found any intact ammonites. The one in the matrix on the right looks like there’s still shell left.

I had no idea what this was. Experts in The Fossil Forum identified it as part of the hinge from an Inoceramid.

Just before time to leave, I spotted this.

And here it is out of the matrix. It looks like a Cretodus Crassidens.

I have been wanting to make it back to the Ellis County creek where I found so many teeth, but by the time I could do it, it had rained enough to raise the creek quite a bit. The water level has just now dropped again. I was working near Ellis County this morning, and when I finished very early, it seemed the perfect time to go back. Rain is forecast for this evening and the next couple of days that will likely bring the creek up again.

Below is what I found that was either loose, or easily removed from matrix. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Here is a view of both sides of the tooth of the day.

Once again, most of the Ptychodus teeth I found were tiny, but I did find this decent sized one. I brought home plenty of matrix, so I’ll have some more fun hunting teeth after this trip.

Update: September 15th. And, a week later, here is what came out of the matrix I brought home. If you add these teeth to what I had already posted, that’s a total of 88 Ptychodus teeth and 102 other teeth from this trip. To someone like me, who never seemed to find many teeth in the past, that’s pretty amazing. As I posted in my report on my first trip to this creek, the teeth all came from a very thin layer of very fossiliferous matrix between layers of the blue-gray shale. That sounds typical of Eagle Ford, but what surprised me more is that something like 80 percent of the teeth came from two very small (like two foot by two foot) areas, and everywhere else in the fossil layer, teeth were few and far between. I also never found a single tooth anywhere in the bottom of the creek on the gravel bars.

I have to confess to not spending a lot of time looking there, since I was finding so many in the matrix, but at Post Oak Creek, the vast majority of what I’ve found was on the gravel bars, with only a few teeth found in sand that I had shoveled into a bucket and taken home, and no teeth at all found in the matrix at the creek. I guess you have to learn the ins and outs of every spot you explore, if you want to find much.

At the end of my second trip to this new creek, I left with the feeling that erosion from high water is really needed to uncover more matrix, if I want to find lots of teeth again, so maybe it’s time for me to go back to exploring new spots for a while, and come back to this creek at a later date. I’m new enough at this that I have very few really good hunting spots, but this one is definitely on that list now.