Fossil Treasures from a 5 Gallon Bucket

[Latimeria]

Last week, my buddy got back from a 3 day digging adventure up north and brought me back (3) 5 gallon buckets of dirt he directly dug out of the bone bed layer. 

3 buckets of dirt don't seem like much, but this layer is a treasure trove for micro fossils if you could put the time in sifting through the fine dusty silt stone matrix. 

I picked some obvious mako teeth to 1.5" as well as cetacean bone.  I also found a sweet dolphin vertebrae in the mix, but it was time for sifting.
I started by bungeeing a small mesh screen on a bucket.





Followed by a larger screen sifter.  There are tons of angel shark and basking shark teeth in here and are very small, so I didn't want to lose anything if I could help it.



I would put 2 handfuls of Matrix on the screen and fine stream it with water to remove the small particles and expose the treasure.  Can you count the fossil teeth I saw just in this picture?  Yep, lots of them! (I see 7 just at a quick glance)





It was a lot of work condensing the matrix of 15 gallons of "dirt" into a condensed fossil treasure trove!  The coarse stuff is in the bucket and the fine stuff is drying on the right.





All cleaned up and the trees got a good deep watering today!



Here are a few of the bigger teeth and pieces I found.  So far I pulled about 25 teeth out, but by the time I start going through my condensed matrix, I'm sure I'll have a few hundred teeth if not more.  I even found partial sea lion and dolphin teeth.



This will be fun when I start looking through the matrix and I'll update everyone as I find some cool stuff.

15 gallons of dirt sifted down turned into 1/2 gallon of fossil gold!

[WheresMyBeer]

So cool Tom. Love these reports 

[MASSfisher]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing!

Just out of curiosity, were the samples taken from the coast or further inland?

[Latimeria]

Very cool. Thanks for sharing!

Just out of curiosity, were the samples taken from the coast or further inland?

Inland about 40 miles.