My fossil hunting came to a screeching halt in mid October when I got COVID. My lung damage didn’t do me any favors apparently, and it really hit me hard. I was in ICU for eight days, and still have disabling shortness of breath a week and a half after getting out of the hospital.

But I’ve been itching to get out, so I decided to make a trip to Lake Benbrook. I figured I wouldn’t have to walk far from where I parked, so could manage some hunting. It was still too much for me, as it turned out. What should have been a five minute hike back up the hill to the van took me twenty minutes, as I had to keep stopping to catch my breath. I’m hoping my pulmonary rehab will improve things, but it’s looking like it may take a while.

Macrostrat showed Fort Worth Limestone and Duck Creek Formation, undivided where I was, but Kiamichi Formation was nearby too. I knew I wasn’t up to any major chiseling, so just took photos of anything big I ran across. Here are some photos I took. I really liked how those oysters and bivalve stood out in that lower left photo. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Other than one tooth, I was just finding oysters, bivalves, and an occasional piece of an ammonite, but I thought these looked a lot like fish fins. After investigating, they appear to be pinna bivalves. I left them in place.

Here is what I brought home. That tooth is very different from any I’ve found before, and I had no idea what it was, but from all the online searching I did, I believe it’s a Paraisurus tooth. Always fun finding something new and different.

I’m getting forgetful in my old age. I forgot to include a scale to show the size of the tooth. What is so unusual about it is that the flat side is oriented perpendicular to the root, rather than parallel with it, like all the other shark teeth I’ve found. And there is no second flat side. The rest of the tooth is all a curve. The only way I could think of to show the flat side in a photo was to use a small piece of paper towel to prop it up, like I’ve done in the photo on the right.

This tooth only has half the root. From what I’ve read, the root of these teeth preserves very poorly, and they are most often found with no root at all. That makes me want to look through all the teeth I have. It’s possible that I’ve found one or two of these before, but did not recognize it because of the missing root. It’s the orientation of that root that makes them recognizable. That, plus only having one flat side.

Edit: Looking through my teeth, I was reminded that there are quite a few with one flat side, and rounded the rest of the way around. But I have nothing else with the root oriented like this one.

I decided to take a break in picking through the matrix from my last trip and actually get out and hunt this morning. I drove over to Hill County, and tried out a new creek. I really didn’t find anything worth mentioning there, left and stopped on the way home at the creek where I’d found so much mud three weeks ago. It was much drier this time, and I had a lot easier time navigating it. But I still didn’t find many fossils. Just like last time though, it produced one that made the trip really worthwhile. This is a fish tail, possibly a Xiphactinus. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Here’s the other side. It’s a very different fossil than anything else I’ve found. I am really taken with this one.

I made a quick trip yesterday back to the Ellis County creek where I found so many teeth. With all the work being done to deer stands and feeders near it last time I was there, I knew my days of being able to hunt it this year were numbered, and sure enough, I have been officially banned by the landowner whose pasture I must cross to get to the creek, until at least next February.

I knew my two best micro-spots in the creek were pretty much played out until we get floods and erosion, but I figured I might spend some time searching the gravel bars in the creek, and walk a little further down the creek than I had before. I made the walk further down the creek first, and never got around to searching the gravel bars very much. Here’s what I spotted just past where I’d been before. How many teeth can you see in that matrix? Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

Besides that one, I brought home some other great looking pieces of matrix. Here are just a few of them.

Obviously, I have a lot of matrix work waiting for me, and I’ll post photos showing what comes out of the matrix later, but I wanted to post photos of a couple of other pieces now. Here is the find of the day, a pliosaur tooth. It’s crumbling too badly for me to remove it from that matrix, but I still thought it was a great find.

And this vert. Even with a piece broken off, it’s still the prettiest vert I’ve ever found. From everything I’ve looked at, it seems to most favor a Coniasaurus vert.

Update: October 3rd. I have stabilized the pliosaur tooth, and think it’s going to hold together.

Update: October 9th. I have finally finished going through the matrix from this trip. Here are the Ptychodus teeth, all 97 of them.

And the other teeth. There were 93 of them. Since I forgot to include the scale in the photo of all of them, the photo below shows the four largest with the scale.

And finally, the Pliosaur tooth is delicate enough that I decided it needed a protective display. Here is what I came up with.

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.

Work has been interfering with both my cycling and fossil hunting time lately. I managed a day off today and started the day with a 30 mile bike ride. But there’s a creek in Ellis County I’ve been wanting to hunt, and I really wanted to get my first look at it while the water is low. With Hurricane Laura bearing down on the coast, I decided to make that hunting trip today, not being at all sure how much longer the water will be this low.

It’s an Eagle Ford outcrop I went to in this creek. With my late start, it was 11:00 before my hike down the creek got me to the outcrop. I left at 2:00, so only had three hours for my first time exploring it. The temperature was in the 90’s and the humidity was high, so it was definitely stifling hot. It did cloud up at times, and actually rained for a few minutes. But it was mostly just sunny and hot.

The outcrop is the typical blue-gray clay you find with Eagle Ford. Click the photos to be able to zoom in and get a closer look.

I didn’t find anything in the blue-gray clay, but in small tan color layers between blue-gray layers, there were lots of fossils.

I’d read that there are teeth to be found in Eagle Ford outcrops, but in my few visits to Eagle Ford, I hadn’t found any. Today, I definitely did find teeth. I guess you just have to find the right layer in Eagle Ford. Zoom in and see how many teeth you can see in the matrix in this photo.

The top three rows of teeth in this photo are all Ptychodus teeth. Many are so small, they don’t look like anything unless you get a really close up look. They all have the tooth shape, and the ridges that tell you what it is. I actually found more of them than other teeth. On the bottom row are a couple of fish fins, shark verts, and something that looks like a claw.

And there are lots of other teeth, along with other fossils, that I still need to remove from matrix.

And more matrix, along with larger shark verts. Today’s creek is closer to home that any other place I have found teeth. I had a smile on my face as I headed for home. I live near Cedar Creek Lake and normally root for rain so the lake stays full, but today was enough to make me want more low water.
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Some of the matrix though, doesn’t seem fazed by hot water. It may take something more to soften it. I haven’t even started on those two biggest pieces of matrix yet. It makes me wish I had brought home more pieces of matrix.

Update: August 29th. Here are the teeth and verts that came out of the matrix. Altogether, I identified 73 Ptychodus teeth from this trip, though many of them were so tiny they would need to be displayed under a magnifying glass. It’s a safe bet that I tossed some tiny ones too, not realizing what they were. Some had the familiar hump with the ridges, others were just flat with ridges.