I’ve learned a lot about fossil hunting in the last almost year and a half, but my last trip to an East Texas creek less than an hour from home had me dealing with something I hadn’t been exposed to before: very tiny fossils, properly called microfossils. It was my first hunting trip to a Kincaid Formation spot, and the Kincaid is known for producing micro shark teeth. Sure enough, the matrix I brought home had lots of those teeth. I ended up finding 83 teeth from that trip and the matrix I brought home from it. Most of those teeth were micro teeth. It’s very likely that previous trips have produced very small fossils. In fact, I’m pretty certain I culled some Ptychodus teeth in the past, when they were too small to be recognized for certain by me. But those were exceptions. The majority of my fossils on those trips weren’t too small to be recognized by the naked eye. That’s what made this trip different. Microfossils were the majority of what I found.

I had bought a magnifying lamp some time back. It was mainly for lure making and fishing rod building. But it also works very well when you’re looking for microfossils in matrix. It doesn’t enlarge things enough for you really get a good look at micro teeth, but it at least makes them big enough that you can recognize them as such. Taking photos of microfossils with a smart phone doesn’t accomplish much. Even taking a photo through the magnifying lamp’s magnifying glass still wouldn’t look like much. It took me a couple of days to get through all the matrix from the last trip. But after the first hour of going through it on the first morning, it was obvious that if I intended to enjoy looking at and sharing photographs of most of the fossils from this trip, I would need a setup specifically for that. It was research time.

It didn’t take long to find what I needed: a digital microscope. Digital microscopes are just like regular microscopes, except that instead of looking through an eyepiece to see the magnified object, that object is displayed on a monitor. There are lots of inexpensive digital microscopes that plug into a usb port on a PC, and use that PC’s monitor as a display. And or course, saving that display as a photograph is a basic function of the microscope. This was all a revelation to me. I hadn’t had a microscope in front of me since high school in the 1960. I picked out a digital microscope on Amazon for $39.95, ordered, and it was delivered the very next day.

My Amazon digital microscope.

Installation of the microscope was as simple as assembling and setting up, downloading software to go with it, and plugging it in to the usb port. Once I got a good look at my micro teeth through the microscope, I discovered they needed some cleaning to get rid of pieces of matrix still clinging to them. A soak in a combination of water, hydrogen peroxide, and Calgon water softener did a nice jot of cleaning them. I also found that many of the teeth were broken, and that very few still had the roots. Identifying shark teeth without the root is pretty tough. I probably need to try to be more gentle with removal from the matrix next time to see if I can get more complete teeth. I suspect that many have already lost the roots before leaving the matrix, though. I didn’t get photos of nearly all of the 83 teeth, but I did try to get enough photos to show most tooth shapes of what I’d found. The teeth photograph a little darker than I’d like. I think I need to find a ruler that’s more of a gray color rather than white, to help with that.

Here is the smallest tooth I photographed.

Those lines are millimeters, so this tooth is less than a millimeter wide, and 1 1/2 millimeters long. That is one tiny tooth. It looks like a speck to the naked eye, and is barely recognizeable as a tooth with my magnifying lamp. But in a digital microscope photo, there it is, in all its toothy glory. For those who don’t do metric, a millimeter is just a little more than 1/32 of an inch.

Here is a collection of teeth photos from the trip. The microscope has no zoom; you just have to move it further from the target object to zoom out enough to photograph a larger object. I never moved the microscope for any of these photos, so some of the larger teeth barely fit in the photo.

I especially like these two. They both have all the root. Beautiful micro teeth, indeed.

And here’s a photo of the Ptychodus tooth. It was large enough that I did have to move the microscope back enough to fit it all into the photo.

I made a fossil hunting trip to a creek in East Texas yesterday and brought home a nice collection of very small teeth. It was the first time I’ve ever had success finding fossils less than an hour drive from home, and I was pretty pleased about that. This was a Kincaid Formation outcrop. The teeth came from a shell hash that was on top of some very hard limestone. Some of the matrix which contained the teeth was the same gray as the limestone, and some of it was a tan color.

I looked at a lot of identical looking matrix which had nothing but shell fragments in it, but once I found teeth, there were more teeth nearby. I had to chisel into the matrix to find teeth, so as I searched for teeth, I just kept tossing matrix pieces into my backpack to take home. So now I have a bunch of matrix to go through. I’m looking forward to doing that in my air conditioned house rather than outside in yesterday’s 98 degree temperatures. LOL. I made an early day of it after it got so hot, heading home before 1:00 in the afternoon. I’ll update this post after I’ve gone through all the matrix.

Here are some matrix pieces I brought home. The upper two are the same gray as the limestone they were on top of. But there was also some tan matrix mixed in, like those two bottom pieces. Both had teeth in them. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Two teeth in the matrix on this rock. The top one was still attached to the matrix, but the bottom one was loose inside a hole that it looked like someone chiseled. So much for my secret spot.

Some of the matrix I brought home had teeth that weren’t too hard to spot.

Here are the 20 teeth I’ve found so far. I’m going to have to do some research to identify some of them. The Kincaid Formation and Paleocene period are both new to me. The surprise of the day was a single small Ptychodus tooth I found. Since Kincaid is 66 to 56 mya, and Ptychodus supposedly went extinct 85 mya, I didn’t expect to see any today. But this one was in the same matrix the other teeth came from. It appears I found a tooth from one of the last of the Mohicans. It didn’t take too long after I posted about this in The Fossil Forum yesterday for someone to suggest that I had likely found the Ptychodus tooth elsewhere and accidentally mixed it in with yesterday’s teeth, but I don’t think so. I have collected no other matrix that breaks apart as easily as this, and I broke the Ptychodus tooth out of a piece of matrix after I got home. It will be interesting to see if I find any other Ptychodus teeth in the rest of the matrix.

If I thought last week’s teeth were small, then these teeth are REALLY small. But I had a blast finding them.

And I have lots more matrix to go through. I’ll check back and update this post after I’ve been through it. Thankfully, it’s nowhere near as hard as most matrix I seem to bring home.

09/03/21 Update: I’ve made it through quite a bit of the matrix. As advertised for Kincaid, this matrix has lots of micro teeth. Between my new prescription eyeglasses and my magnifying lamp I bought, I can see them much better than I ever would have been able to before. So I’m researching the care and feeding of microfossils. I have ordered a digital microscope. Hopefully when it arrives, I’ll be able to post some decent photos of these teeth. I’m beginning to see the attraction of microfossils. What looks like nothing more than a speck to the naked eye is a beautiful tooth under that magnifying lamp.

09/04/21 Update: I’ve gotten in my digital microscope and started taking photos of the teeth. Here is one of the smallest, no more than a speck to the naked eye.

And here is one that reminds me of how many are broken and how many need to be cleaned up. I guess I need to research cleaning recommendations for teeth this small. And I need a new ruler, without so many scratches, no doubt.

09/05/21 Update: I made a cleaning solution of water, hydrogen peroxide, and Calgon and soaked the teeth for an hour. Here is that same tooth afterward. Guess it’s time to make myself a gallery.

I made a trip to a new creek in Hill County last Thursday. This is another Eagle Ford formation creek, though it is very close to Austin Chalk coverage. It was another creek that’s tough to hike in places. Even with my new, first time ever, prescription glasses on, I didn’t find a whole lot, but I did bring home a few interesting pieces.

Here are opposite direction views of the same outcrop in the creek. It has the blue gray clay you find so often in Eagle Ford outcrops. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Here’s my friend I met in the creek. I let this big guy swim on by before I waded across.

There were lots and lots of small ammonite imprints in rocks, like the one in the upper left part of this rock, but no surviving ammonite fossils that I found.

And there were lots and lots of shell fragments in rocks. These were bigger than most.

This rock looks like just another of those with lots of shell fragments.

But this side view of the same rock shows a hidden jewel I almost missed. That’s a Ptychodus tooth.

Shark teeth were few and far between in the creek, but here are a couple of pretty ones, though small, still in the matrix.

As I get more experience at fossil hunting, I’ve gotten better about not just picking up everything neat looking that I find. But I couldn’t resist this, one of the larger bison teeth I’ve run across.

There were lots of hard to identify fossils in the rocks. That looks like some kind of tooth on the left, but I have no idea what the others are. They all look too delicate to remove from the matrix, but I may do a bit of pick work to try and tell better what they are.

And finally, this bone. The first photo shows a view of each side of it. There is still a bit of rock attached. I didn’t remove any matrix from it; this is just the way I found it. The last photo shows a side view. I’ve posted these photos in The Fossil Forum. I’m hoping someone there can identify it.

I made a trip to the North Sulfur River yesterday. I was was trying out a new part of the river. The FM2990 bridge had been my favorite spot on the river to hunt, but things have changed. They are damming up the river to build a new lake, Lake Ralph Hall. This has closed the fossil park near Ladonia, so they built a new parking lot and made access a lot easier at the FM2990 bridge. With all the new fossil hunters going there, I knew I needed a new spot, so yesterday, I tried this spot further down the river, at the FM2675 bridge. I didn’t find much there, so I’m going to keep looking at new spots on the river.

Like further up the river, there were lots and lots of Egogyra Ponderosa oysters, including some beautiful large specimens. But they are very heavy to carry around in a backpack, and I already have plenty of them at home, so I resisted the temptation to pick up more. You expect to find large stuff at NSR, and after hiking quite a ways down the river without finding much at all, I decided that on the hike back, I needed to start looking for small stuff.

Here are the bones from the trip. Nothing I can identify, but cool all the same. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Where I hunted further up the river, there are lots and lots of baculites to be found. Here, all I could find were small broken pieces of baculites, like the two on the left in this photo. I thought the tiny ammonite on the right was cool, though.

I’ve always liked finding pieces of worm tubes like the ones in this photo. It can be really hard to spot them at NSR, though.

And finally, the teeth. Teeth always seem to be really hard to find at NSR, and when you do, they’re usually in rough shape, like these two in the bottom photo. And the top photo shows what you’re searching in to find them.

After nine months, I finally made it back to the Ellis County creek where I’ve found so many teeth. This is an Eagle Ford outcrop. The water level was much higher than I expected. It wasn’t quite up to the matrix that holds most of the fossils, but high enough to make wading across the creek dicey, plus I didn’t get to hunt most of the sand bars.

This is the biggest fish vert I’ve ever found. Most of the fish verts I’ve found in this creek aren’t in very good condition either, but this one is in really nice shape. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

As usual for this creek, most of the Ptychodus teeth I found were pretty small, but I did find these two nicer ones.

These are still in the matrix. They are mosasaur verts. I’ve never found mosasaur verts in the creek before, and today I found two of them.

As usual for this creek, I brought home lots of interesting looking matrix to go through.

Here are the other teeth I found. As usual, there were more Ptychodus teeth than anything else. I’m sure there will be more from the matrix. I’ll add photos after I’ve gotten through the matrix.

This photo shows how close the water level was to the matrix holding fossils.

Update: July 10th. Matrix removed, here is what I brought home. I’m always amazed at the number of Ptychodus teeth in this creek.