Several weeks ago I had the chance to go digging around in the Tropic Shale for Cretaceous fossils and came back with a pretty good haul of shells, snails, and ammonites. Today I got to visit another area in the Tropic and came back with more cool stuff! In this first image are two shark teeth along with one from a ray. The shark tooth on the right measures over 3 cm. (1.18 in.) and is the largest of the 36 I collected - most of them only about .64 cm. (about 1/4 in.). The ray tooth is about 1.5 cm. ( 0.6 in.) and the largest of 7 that I found.

These are pretty cool, too: Fossilized jawbones fragments from some kind of fish from the period. The smaller fragment still contains a tooth and, in the larger fragment you can see where the teeth have broken off when looking at it from the top.

Unlike my last "expedition" where it was sometimes necessary to use a rock hammer to break apart pieces of rock, this time all I did was look around on the ground (on my hands and knees!). Once I knew what I was looking for, the teeth would really stand out against the normal rock. It wasn't like they were just lying around for the taking, either, as it did require some diligent searching. Included in the day's take were some assorted fish bone fragments and a vertebrae as well as a few pieces of coprolites (that would be fossilized, um, fish poop), and some pieces of sandstone with ammonite impressions embedded in them.

It was all great fun, though now my knees are a little sore!