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.