It was finding an ammonite segment on a fishing trip back in 2013 that reminded me how fascinating I find fossils. So, when I started researching where to go fossil hunting back in April, the Lake Texoma area quickly became high on my list, because it has large ammonites, both on the lower lake, and on the Red River above the lake. But the water level remained too high all spring and early summer. Even now, it is likely too high to find much on the lower lake. But the river flow and level has finally decreased enough that I decided to make a trip to it yesterday, to hunt a Duck Creek outcropping on a bluff. This was one of those trips that turned into more of an adventure than I bargained for. The hike from where I had to park was a lot longer and more arduous than I anticipated (it always looks easy on a satellite image, doesn’t it?), and it ended up being one of those situations where I just couldn’t come back the way I went in. So, I ended up getting lost, and hiking a much further distance on the return, with a heavy backpack.

I should have taken a moment to mark on gps where I parked the van, and didn’t do it. I won’t make that mistake again. Even when you don’t have wifi or cell coverage (and I didn’t), gps works, and I’ll use it better from now on. I wouldn’t have been able to make anything close to a straight line hike back to the van, but would have done a lot better than I did. When you end up making an unexpectedly long hike with a heavy backpack on a humid ninety something degree day in July in Oklahoma, you run out of water. That iced tea in my lunch ice chest in the van was very welcome when I finally got back to it. This is a great fossil hunting spot, but I think I’m putting it on my list of spots for milder weather times of the year.

Once I reached the bluff, I couldn’t believe how many large ammonite fragments there were. Every five steps I took, I saw another, and took over thirty photos in short order. Here are a few representative photos. Keep in mind that chisel is 12 inches (30 cm) long. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

I excavated a few of the half embedded large ammonites. I was thinking that if I found a very large complete ammonite, that would be the one thing that would go into my backpack for the return hike. Even one of these would make for quite a challenge to get back with. I kept thinking I would find a complete one, but I didn’t. This is as close as I got. I already have so many ammonite fragments at home, I just didn’t want to carry heavy ones that weren’t part of a complete ammonite.

I did manage to find a couple of smaller ammonites that, embedded in lots of matrix, look like they might be complete. I decided these were the two I would take home. I recently purchased an air scribe, so I’ll see how I do at removing the matrix. I have some gastropods I’m going to practice on first. These two ammonites still need some chisel work first, and I thought about chiseling more on them on site to get them lighter to carry, but I decided I’d rather do it at home, where I can take my time, and am better armed with glue if needed. Once I got them home and cleaned better, I can see that it’s just marl covering the larger one. That shouldn’t be too tough to remove. But it’s lots of solid limestone on the smaller one. That’s going to be a chore.

These are the only smaller things I kept. I seem to have a tougher time than most finding any echinoids, so I was tickled to find these two. The top of that echinoid on the right was completely covered with limestone to the point where I almost didn’t recognize it as an echinoid. But I did recognize it; my eyes must be getting better. A vinegar soak and scrub brush work confirmed what it is.

The fossil on the lower left appears to be part of a coral. I don’t know what the lower right one is. It’s shaped like a broken tooth, but the wrong color for a tooth. I was tempted to dismiss it as a burrow fragment (there were lots of those around), but it just looks so much like a tooth. There were plenty of Gryphaea and small bivalves, but I didn’t gather any of those.

With so many large ammonites everywhere, I reallly had trouble training my eyes to look for small stuff. I love ammonites, and the kid-in-the-candy-store syndrome was hard to overcome to make myself look for the other fossils I knew were there. Perhaps I’ll get better with experience. And I limited my time at the bluff, knowing the hike back was going to be tough, and might take a long time. If I come back when it’s cooler outside, I can stay longer and spend more time looking for the small treasures.

I had done 40 mile bike rides each of the two previous afternoons in the heat of the day, and this kind of hike right behind those was definitely overdoing things for this old fart. Duly noted.

My lesson about marking my vehicle location on GPS wasn’t my last lesson from this trip. The next one came from the Dallas Paleontological Society. I had joined DPS in April, when I first started researching fossil hunting in this area. Their meetings are too far away for me to attend, and all their fossil hunting trips are on Saturdays, which doesn’t work for me, but even considering those two things, it still seemed worthwhile to join. I would be supporting the nearest thing to a local club, there were lots of experts there I might be able to confer with if needed, and they did have a wealth of online resources on their web site I could use when I research.

But shortly after this Texoma trip, I got a nasty email from them. They told me that not only was this one of their secret fossil hunting spots which I couldn’t have gotten to without trespassing (an ouright lie), but they also had a trip coming up to this spot in a couple of weeks, and they didn’t allow members to go hunting their spots just before a club trip. They asked me to change my post in The Fossil Forum to make the location of my hunt less easy to figure out, and gave me a stern warning about hunting before a club trip, telling me I would be tossed out of the club if I did it again. Believe it or not, after waiting for months for the water level to recede enough to hunt this spot, I now had a club telling me where and when I could and couldn’t fossil hunt.

I complied with the request to change my post in The Fossil Forum by contacting a moderator and getting him to change the post. Then, I promptly resigned my DPS membership. I’ll no doubt miss their online resources at times when I’m researching, but I’ll live with that. Having a club telling me when and where I can hunt will always be completely unacceptable to me. Good riddance, DPS.

I am working again these days, but on Wednesday, I got off early enough that I made a trip to a creek in northern Hill County. Its limestone walls are full of fossils, but the limestone is very hard. It is obvious that I need to get better at chiseling fossils out of limestone. I could get lots of practice in this creek. Macrostrat shows the area where I was as being right on the border of the Fredericksburg and Washita Groups.

The first thing I noticed about this creek was how many Gryphaea (devil’s toenail) oysters there were. Most are pretty small, but they are everywhere. There are more of them in the creek than all other fossils combined, including lots of limestone pieces just full of small ones like the one in this photo. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Getting a large ammonite out of the limestone in this creek is really tough. I may need to bring a bigger hammer next time.

This ammonite fragment was one of the few fossils I found that was loose, not embedded in the limestone. As straight as the fragment is, I’m thinking it must be from a heteromorphic ammonite. I wish I could have found the rest of it. I notice that some of the rock in it is the gray limestone the creek walls are full of, but some of the inside of it more closely matches the tan loose rocks that were everywhere between the topsoil and the gray limestone. It made me wonder if it came from where these two different rock layers meet.

And of course I picked up some gastropods, most with varying amounts of limestone attached. I figure when I get around to trying to use a dremel or air scribe to remove limestone from fossils, these will be good practice pieces.

There were fossilized burrows like these all over the place in the limestone in this creek. I thought they looked really cool.

I made a hike down the North Sulfur River bottom today, and as usual, there were fun things to be found. There are shell fragments everywhere in the shale at NSR, but most of them aren’t from ammonites like this one. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

This ammonite imprint in the shale actually had two pieces nearby which fit together nicely.

I found this almost complete ammonite in a creek wall, but it sure is trying to fall apart.

And a beautiful fish tooth, even if it’s broken. It’s from an Enchodus.

The most common fossils at this part of NSR are baculites and barbed wire. They’re both everywhere. I left all the barbed wire, but kept these two baculites.

I keep telling myself I’m not going to make that long hike down the river bottom with another heavy Egogyra Ponderosa oyster in my backpack, but then I find a beauty like this.

I walked the North Sulfur River yesterday. I was surprised at how low the water is. There had been a 3 1/2 foot rise at the gauge downstream just a couple of days earlier, but it’s obvious there has been no rain at the FM2990 bridge. There is not much water flow at all. No fresh water made me wonder how picked over it would be, but there always seems to be interesting things to be seen at NSR, so down into the river bed I went.

I found these two ammonite fragments lying, half buried in sand, exactly in the position in this photo. If they are halves of the same ammonite, there is some material missing between them. These are the largest ammonite fragments I’ve found at NSR. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

More ammonite pieces.

A lamniform shark vert.

And the bones. Most are mosasaur bones, but the thought in The Fossil Forum was that the bone in the lower right and in the bottom photo is part of a fish skull, a Xiphactinus, to be exact.

I made my first trip to Post Oak Creek today. There had been rain in the forecast for yesterday, so I hoped for some newly washed out fossils, but Sherman got no rain. So, I knew things would be pretty picked over, but I decided to go anyway, and just hike a bit further down the creek than I normally might, to see if I could find a few teeth anyway.

I stayed about three hours. The knee pads I bought yesterday were definitely a good investment. These old fart eyes need to be close to the sand bars to get within reading glass distance of those small teeth. I had also made a sifter, and carried out half a bucket of sand to go through at home. I had fun. That creek is an amazing fossil place. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

You really can’t appreciate just how large of an area on the banks, and creek walls in places, that are covered with fossilized shell filled rocks, until you see it. I brought home this one rock to remind myself of what the place looked like, as well as try to explain it to others.

There are truly fossil fragments everywhere on those sand bars. I was mainly looking for teeth, so I tended to ignore all the other stuff, but I couldn’t resist picking up these two small gastropods.

Up until now, I had hardly found any shark teeth, so it was fun picking up teeth today. The tooth in that last photo is a Ptychodus tooth.

I made another trip to the North Sulfur River yesterday. I spent too much time hiking and exploring, but still found some interesting things. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

A really nice Egogyra Ponderosa I couldn’t resist bringing home. It’s amazing how many fragments of these there are in the river, but I don’t usually find one in this shape.

A shark tooth and some kind of fish tooth.

And these look like Hamulus worm tubes.

An ammonite segment.

As I work less and have more free time, I have added a new hobby, and I’m going to post some new things from it here. It’s fossil hunting. I have always been fascinated by rocks and fossils, but my first real fossil was found on a fishing trip at Benbrook in 2013. In the roots of a toppled and half submerged tree, I found this. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

I had no idea what it was, but I was sure it was some kind of fossil. So I joined The Fossil Forum and made a post asking what it was. It is, of course, a piece of an ammonite. It was all enough to really get me interested in fossil hunting, but between work, family, and all my cycling, I really didn’t have time for a new hobby. I vowed that when I retired, fossil hunting was something I was going to consider adding as a hobby. That time has now arrived.

The trip I made to the North Sulfur River today was my third fossil hunting trip, and the first one I had finds I deemed worthy of posting here. Here is what I posted in The Fossil Forum:

I made my second trip to the North Sulfur River today. I had planned on going yesterday, but it was pretty chilly early, and today was forecast to be much warmer, plus the water was still coming down, so I settled for a 50 mile bike ride yesterday, and headed for the NSR this morning. I seem to be making the most of this time of social distancing / off work. A bike ride yesterday, NSR today, and I’ll be crappie fishing tomorrow. If this is a preview of retirement, sign me up. Once again, I just went to the Ladonia Fossil Park. I hiked downstream, the opposite of the direction I headed last time.

I’m still finding out what my physical capabilities are for this kind of trip. With all my bike riding, my legs are strong, and I’m in great aerobic shape, but at 69 years old, and after almost 50 years of heavy machine shop work, my back and shoulders are pretty cratered. I’m not sure how I’ll hold up for long hikes down treacherous river bottoms, or climbing in and out.

I probably pack my backpack lighter than most here. But after hiking a couple of miles down the river and back today, I feel fine. So, maybe I can hold up to these trips better than I thought. I’m ready to try getting in and out of the river at some other spots. I drove over to the FM2990 bridge and looked at that access. I’ll tackle it, but I’m definitely going to do it on a dry day. That rope climb back up looks tough.

I’d also like to try out the river downstream at 24. A question for those who know the area: Google satellite photos show a lot more water in that area, with hardly any sand bars showing. Is the water that much higher there, or is it just when Google took the photos? Do I need to wait for lower water to try that out? Water level today was 2.08.

I thought this ammonite segment was cool.

And here is a bacculite piece.

But the find of the day was this fish vertebrae.