When winter hits full force, I tend to hunker down and organize my studio space. Typically, I find unlabeled containers holding treasures that I had forgotten about. Like the trove of fossils I dug out of Florida’s Peace River last February when Fred Mazza of Paleo Discoveries led us on a tour through what could have been Jurassic Park.
In gear-laden canoes, we paddled to a stretch of river bank that would hopefully yield a good fossil haul. Standing in the river up to our thighs, we used shovels and sieves to sort through pounds and pounds of gravel. Hours later, I had a nice collection of fossils, including pieces of turtle shell, a portion of deer antler, a piece of horse tooth, an alligator scute, shark teeth, sting ray mouth plates, and even the upper mouth plate of a puffer fish! The largest fossils I found were portions of rib bone from the dugong (relative of the manatee).
Finding reptile, mammal, and fish fossils was quite a departure from the usual seashell and coral fossils I’ve found in Florida. But hey, I get a kick out of finding those too. And I enjoy contemplating how I can incorporate them into jewelry. Or at least recollecting warmer times in tropical climes.
